


phobos

by climbingvines



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: (Fear of Birds), (fear of being watched), (fear of bridges), (fear of dolls), (fear of enclosed spaces), (fear of heights), (fear of rejection), (fear of spiders), (fear of water/drowning), (oh look he has two tags what's that about), (some injuries that heal magically in a fairly gruesome way and of course Wooyoung is a banshee), Abusive Relationships, Acrophobia, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Angst, Anthropophobia, Aquaphobia, Arachnophobia, Banshee!Wooyoung, Banshees, Birds, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Claustrophobia, Dark Magic, Demons, Drowning, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fear, Fluff and Smut, Gephyrophobia, Happy Ending, Horror, Illusions, Immortal!Jongho, Immortality, Jongho is a bit of a morally grey character, Lots Of Wandering Lost In The Woods, Love Confessions, M/M, Major Character Death - Temporary, Memory Loss, Minor Relationship: San & Yeosang, Motorcycle Accident/Crash, Ornithophobia, Pediophobia, Pls Let Me Know If I Forgot Anything Else This Is A Hard One To Tag!!, Psychological Horror, Scopophobia, Someone Falls Off A Bridge, Spiders, Tags I Just Realized I Forgot Pls Yell At Me:, Thunder and Lightning, Water Wraith!Wooyoung, Witches, and then at the end!!, but better safe than sorry, but his death is depicted on screen in a flashback, demon!San, demon!yeosang, idk if thats a phobia/trigger for some people, techincally wooyoung is a banshee so he's already dead, the following phobias are depicted:, the witches in this verse live off of fear, witch!Jongho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:55:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 27,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27171376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/climbingvines/pseuds/climbingvines
Summary: Jongho didn’t remember who he was before he died. Or even if he had died. He supposed he had to have died, or had to have been very near death, to agree to the pact that made him what he was. Part of the deal was forgetting everything about yourself, but what did it matter if you forgot? As long as you continued to live.
Relationships: Choi Jongho/Jung Wooyoung
Comments: 17
Kudos: 57
Collections: All Hallows ATEEZ Exchange





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScarlettSiren](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScarlettSiren/gifts).



> This fic was a monster to write and I hope it is as fun for you guys to read as it was for me to think up. I love writing horror and this prompt absolutely spoke to me. 
> 
> Happy Halloween and please mind the tags!

The scream ripped through the humid October night like a streak of lingering summer lightning. 

Heads turned as conversation stopped, everyone on the lively little covered balcony of the best bar downtown pausing to look down the street. They looked as if they could just keep on looking forever, until their gaze reached the thick wall of old growth forest that marked the edge of town and lined the highway leading up, up, up into the mountains. 

“Somebody needs a new set of brake pads!” Someone chuckled, and everyone laughed with him, turning back to the drinks and their conversation. 

If you looked closely, you could see the tension in their shoulders, the tightness around their eyes and in the way they gripped the necks of beer bottles just a little bit too hard. Their smiles were wide, but they were brittle. The music pouring from the speakers mounted on the wall sounded tinny and out of tune, now, like the atmosphere was suddenly too heavy to carry the notes one after the other and hold them in the shape of a song. 

Jongho didn’t turn back to his date. 

Instead, he stood with his arms resting on the rustic wooden railing, his own beer bottle dangling precariously from his fingertips, threatening to drop down and shatter on the sidewalk down below. His gaze never wavered as he stared down the pretty little road that made up Main Street, followed it with his eyes until the street lights dimmed and then his vision kept going, past the city limit sign around the twists and turns, beyond the treeline and into the dark, damp crush of underbrush. He scanned the shadowed places between ancient trunks looking for even the slightest hint of movement-

“Jongho-ssi,” He jerked when she touched him, the soft shape of her small hand coming to rest gently in the crook of his elbow. The beer bottle slipped from his fingers and crashed to the sidewalk below, exploding into a glittering starburst as people exclaimed in shock. The shadow slipped from his grasp and he lost the ability to See.

His date gasped, her hands coming up to cover her mouth as she stared down at the shards of glass coating the sidewalk. 

“I’m sorry!” she mumbled, horrified. “I called your name but I didn’t think you heard me. I didn’t mean to frighten you, oh I hope no one got hurt.”

The balcony door opened revealing a red faced manager who rather unkindly asked them to leave. Jongho apologized and paid for the meals of those who had been sitting on the patio, enjoying their meal before being assaulted by shrapnel from the sky. 

His date followed along at his elbow anxiously. 

He couldn’t remember her name, but that wasn’t important. 

His motorcycle was parked in the back lot of the big church that stood on top of the hill, looking down on downtown with it’s busy nightlife and all it’s neon like an overbearing school principal. 

For some reason people felt less inclined to commit grand theft auto if it’s out of a church parking lot, and safe places to park his very expensive motorcycle were few and far between. One of his most prized possessions, the Yamaha had cost him a small fortune. Sleek black in a vintage style and wickedly fast, it was worth the short walk up the steep hill to reach it as long as it was safe. His date followed along behind him, hovered around him like a nervous mouse drawn to a trap by the enticing smell of cheese.

The deserted parking lot was dark and empty; vast, shadowed, and suffocatingly remote compared to the noise and lights of downtown. Jongho barely spared her a glance as he took his own helmet from the handlebars and then dug into his tail bag for his spare, holding it out wordlessly to his date. She hesitated for only a moment before taking it and carefully fastening it under her chin. He took his own helmet and put it on. Unlike his spare, his helmet covered his whole head, face and all, and his date shifted; uneasy that she could no longer see his face. He swung a leg over his bike and turned his head in her direction, waiting for her to make a move. She stood there, frozen in the dark of the parking lot, seemingly at war with herself before she climbed on behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“Hold on tight.” He said, and then he kicked the bike to life and roared out of the parking lot. He could just barely hear her gasp of surprise before they were on the highway and speeding off towards the mountain. 

She didn’t try to speak, didn’t ask where they were going, and he didn’t supply the answer. The lights of the moderately sized tourist trap of a town he’d called home for a little over a year now faded behind them at an alarming speed. The treeline whipped past them at over 160kmph and the leather of his jacket creaked underneath the sheer force of her arms wrapped around his middle, her head tucked into his back, right between his shoulder blades. He could feel her body jerking occasionally and at first he thought she might be crying, but then he realized that she was laughing, wild and delighted. He slowed the bike gradually as they climbed the side of the mountain and eventually, they turned down a narrow side road practically invisible between the trunks of ancient oaks, especially if you didn’t know to look for it. 

The cabin sat near the edge of a cliff, the sharp drop off enough to make anyone feel breathless, like the whole thing was going to tumble away at any moment. 

A single light burned in the living room window as he rolled to a stop. She shivered as she slowly uncoiled from behind him. He waited as she clambored off the bike on unsteady legs before he knocked the kickstand back and swung his leg over. She hugged the thin jacket she wore against her sides, bouncing in place as she waited for him to unlock the front door.

“Tea or coffee?” He asked, tossing his keys onto a little wooden table by the front door. 

“Tea sounds lovely, thanks.”

\---

Han Dasol woke with a groan. She had no idea where she was. The darkness around her was absolute at first. 

Slowly, she became aware of the smell of damp earth, the rough crush of stones and sticks barely softened by the material of her jacket and the fabric of her jeans. Her shoes were missing, but she stumbled to her feet anyway. Slowly, as her eyes adjusted to the weak starlight filtering between the swaying tree branches and while it should have been obvious to her immediately, she realized she was outside. 

The stones and sticks cut her bare feet as she turned slowly on the spot. The last thing she remembered was taking a mug of tea from her date; from the handsome, mysterious Choi Jongho and settling down beside him on his couch to watch a movie. It was late and she’d blushed thinking about him asking her to stay, because why wouldn’t he? After driving her all the way up to his house on the mountain? She’d at least been hoping for a kiss or two, but the last thing she remembered was the feeling of warm ceramic between her palms and the flicker of the light from the television playing over the planes of his face as she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. 

The wind whistled through the trees as the branches shifted, creaking against one another, clattering. The dry leaves above swirled together creating a rush of noise that made it hard for her to tell if it was raining or not through the thick foliage. A sudden flash of lightning both answered the question for her and startled a sob out of her throat that was lost in the rumble of thunder. 

How did she get here?

She trembled, tugging her thin coat tight around her frame as she took a cautious step forward. 

The clearing she was in was tiny, minuscule, barely a few meters of space between colossal tree trunks that looked like they’d take a dozen men to fell. She couldn’t even tell which way was out. The wind howled as the storm picked up. Dasol took another few cautious steps through the trees. She was afraid. Afraid to stay where she was, afraid to wander and get lost, afraid of the dark, the wind, the storm. She couldn’t see more than a few shaky steps in front of her; she could walk headlong off a cliff and she wouldn’t be able to tell she was in danger until it was too late. 

The ground seemed to slope upwards after a while and she hesitated. Should she go up the mountain? She didn’t know how far she’d have to walk to make it back into town, so the logical thing seemed to be that she should find the cabin, but she didn’t know how she got out here in the first place. 

Was going back to the cabin safe? Did she sleepwalk? Did Jongho leave her out here? How did he get her out here without her waking up? There was another flash of lightning and she jerked, surprised. The movement made her head throb as she rubbed the brightness from her eyes. Had she been drugged? 

She remembered the phantom warmth of the mug of tea nestled between her palms and felt like she was going to be sick. 

Down the mountain... she would go down. 

Dasol turned in the darkness and felt her way down the hill, her breath hitching in her throat whenever the ground became too steep and she felt like she would fall. The rain was finally beginning to fall in earnest now, washing over her like cold waves of ice. Her hair stuck to her forehead and the tears that streamed down her face felt hot in comparison to the icy water. 

Once or twice she heard a branch snap behind her, and she whirled around to stare into the darkness, back up the slope where she’d just been. Uneasy terror slid down her back to join the rain pooling around the tops of her jeans. 

She kept going. 

The wind was nothing short of howling now, stifled by the underbrush one second and then the next it was whipping through gaps in the trees to pull at her clothes like it was trying to force her to the ground and carry her away at the same time. 

A rock rolled down the hill from up above her, passed her on its way down and came to rest against the trunk of a tree. Had she dislodged it on her way down or had something else? In the moments between one heartbeat and the next she heard it, the unmistakable sound of a boot crunching down on the detritus of the forest, too controlled and steady to be anything else. A human sound. 

She was not alone. 

The terror was a living thing inside her chest, now, as she tried to stay calm. Tried not to let whoever was following her know that  _ she _ knew they were there. Hiccuping sobs joined her tears as she made her way down the slope. Her hands and feet were numb and the soaking wet material of her jeans was beginning to rub her thighs raw in places. Dasol had no idea how long she’d been walking but she didn’t see an end in sight. Her muscles all felt tense and achy, both from her continuous controlled fall down the side of the mountain and from the actual physical effort of keeping her eyes and ears trained to listen for whoever might be following her. 

Dasol stumbled when she reached a flat stretch of ground and panicked for a moment, looking around in the near darkness trying to decide which way to go. It felt like a road beneath her feet, two ruts that could have been tire tracks. But which way? Which way should she go? One direction would lead back up, obviously, and the other should go down... but what if she went the wrong way?

She tried to picture the ride up, tucked on the back of the motorcycle behind her handsome date. Why had she let him bring her up here? She hadn’t even asked, she’d just taken the helmet and gotten on the bike. What was wrong with her, why did she do that? Who did something like that? 

She heard something pushing through the brush behind her and in a fit of panic turned to the right. She forced herself to walk. The wind was harsher here with no trees to block it, whipping down the narrow path, tearing at her clothes, freezing them to her skin as the rain stung her cheeks, her neck, and the backs of her hands like needles of ice. 

The road tilted up at a gentle rise. She tried to tell herself that was okay, that hills went up both directions, that she would have to go up to get back down. If she got to the top and there was no down, well then she would just turn around and go back.

Back towards whoever was following her.

She froze. 

She should just go back now, right? They probably wouldn’t follow her up the road, they would stick to the treeline so if she turned and ran very quickly she could probably pass them up before they realized she’d doubled back. Maybe then she could lose them. 

She turned around and broke into a jog, going back the way she came. The hill seemed much more steep going down and she stumbled a few times, her feet skidding in the rocks and mud. 

A bolt of lightning ripped through the sky and she froze.

Fear. Complete, crippling, absolute fear worked its way like electricity through every layer of flesh. She’d never felt anything like it before, but she knew what it was. She whipped around and looked back the way she came. In the fading blaze of lightning she could just make out the silhouette of a figure, standing at the crest of the hill. It was like every muscle in her body locked up as she stared at the spot of darkness where the shape of a man had been, stared so hard with eyes so wide that they hurt. She couldn’t move, couldn’t blink even.

The lightning flashed again, and this time she saw him clearly. 

He looked like he was dead. 

Stringy white blond hair plastered to his forehead, eyes filmy and grey, a mouth ringed with the rotten black of decay. The light faded and she finally blinked. Her foot slid backwards through the ankle deep quagmire of mud, in the slow careful way one might try to edge away from a wild dog or a bear; so as not to startle it or draw unnecessary attention to one’s self. 

An unearthly sound filled the woods. A long, wailing shriek that made the hair on Dasol's head stand on end. Even in the unsettling darkness that shrouded the top of the hill she could make out the way the man’s eyes shifted from the milky white of the dead to a blazing, hellfire red.

Her body jerked to life and she bolted down the narrow road; back the way she had come, the only way she could go, and didn't dare look behind her. 

This was a nightmare, Dasol told herself as she ran. That creature, that  _ thing _ couldn’t possibly be real. She would wake up any minute now and probably scare herself half to death as her body tried to keep running and she fell out of bed, but she would laugh, because it hadn’t been real. It was all just a dream.

There was someone up ahead, she realized, as another flash of lightning illuminated the road before her. Her momentary fear that it was the creature turned to sheer terror when she realized that it was Jongho. He stood in the middle of the road, hair looking perfectly dry and perfectly styled despite the pouring rain that didn’t seem to touch him. The buffeting wind didn’t disturb the folds of the heavy leather jacket he wore, either. It was like he was there but he wasn’t. His face seemed to be carved of stone, and for all she knew he could be a statue, until his eyes met hers and the corners of his mouth curled up into a smile and kept curling, too wide, with too many teeth-

Dasol took a sharp left turn off the path into the trees. Their branches caught on her clothes like fingers, lashing and scratching at her bare limbs so bad that she knew that she bled, even through the material. Her lungs protested in pain, as her heart threw itself against her rib cage like it was trying to escape the confines of her chest.

She ran until she couldn’t anymore, until she couldn’t have found her way back to the rutted road even if she tried. She was impossibly lost, now. 

Dasol threw herself on the ground behind a particularly thick tree trunk. She pressed her back against it, knees curled close to her chest, as she pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle the sound of her labored breathing. She wasn’t safe here, every sound felt like a gunshot going off right next to her head, every shift of the leaves in the canopy above her head was a signal that she’d been found. She desperately tried to drag air into her lungs for when she would have to run again. 

Dasol listened intently as thunder crashed overhead and flashes of lightning illuminated the trees around her, creating grotesque shapes that shifted and moved as her eyes adjusted. Then she heard him. Those same heavy, booted footfalls making their way steadily through the trees. She went rigid, palms and fingers pressed so hard against her own mouth that she knew she would have bruises in the morning. He was just to the left of her, somewhere in the darkness not more than six meter away from where she hid. She couldn’t even turn her head, afraid of what she would see, afraid to move in case he saw her. The tears were falling silently down her cheeks again, steady in a way that seemed surreal. From the darkness she heard a deep voice she recognized all to well ask,

“Where are you…I know you’re here…I saw you”. 

Dasol clasped both hands across her mouth to stop her scream from escaping. 

She could hear him breathing. How she could hear him breathing over the sound of the storm she didn’t know, but she could practically feel his hot breath on the back of her neck and her whole body tensed, like it was waiting for the snapping bite of sharp teeth. Panicked, her eyes searched the ground around her. She spied a rock, about the size of a small melon and picked it up, hugging it to her chest. She could use it as a weapon, maybe, but could she swing it hard enough to make a difference? Could she do it fast enough? No, there was no way. 

She made a snap decision and with everything she had left in her exhausted frame she threw the rock behind her and off to the right. It crashed through the underbrush, making one hell of a racket as it went. She listened as he immediately bolted in the direction of the sound. 

Laughing. He fucking laughed. 

Dasol waited, listened as his footsteps got quieter and quieter until she was sure she wouldn’t be so visible to him in the near perfect darkness if she moved. She stumbled to her feet, ran around the tree and straight into a solid, warm wall of flesh. His hands closed around her upper arms as she looked up at his face, already beginning to split into another one of those too wide smiles,

“Caught you.” He whispered. 

She screamed, the sound echoing between the trees as she thrashed, breaking his hold. She turned and ran trying to put as much distance between her and him as possible. She had to find a way off this mountain! 

She tried to pull up the little bit of survival training she’d learned as a Girl Scout. She’d made it all the way to the Yeonjangdae level, earned every merit badge possible until she’d had to quit when she was sixteen to focus on her studies, but it was like all that hard earned knowledge had escaped her when she needed it most. What did you do when you were lost on a mountain and no one knew where to look for you? When sitting in one place and waiting for rescue is the same thing as waiting for death? You find water. 

There had to be a stream somewhere, if she found it she could follow it down the mountain. It would be dangerous, with the rain probably swelling even the most placid of creeks into torrents of water, rocks, and debris, but it was the only hope she had. She strained her ears, searching for the sound of rushing water. 

The trees finally cleared and Dasol could just make out another flat stretch on the other side. She pushed herself a little bit harder. If she could just get one more sprint out of her ruined muscles, she might be able to put enough space between her and him that he wouldn’t be able to find her again in the trees on the other side. The flat stretch of ground would be perfect for her to put on some real speed and…the ground disappeared from below her feet.

She tumbled head over heels down the embankment and crashed into the water below. Her mouth, wide open in shock, filled with muddy water and she choked. She spat it out in a violent coughing fit, both elated to have found the stream and terrified that he’d heard her fall. 

Her palms were bleeding now. The trickle of heat making its way down her forehead stung her eyes and smelled sharply of iron as it streamed around her nose and made its way into her nostrils. Grimly, she wiped away the blood and made her way downstream as quietly as possible. The stream bordered the woods, and she couldn’t stop herself from looking up periodically like she might be able to spot him before he came sauntering out of the treeline.

Dasol had no idea how long she’d been walking, wading through the frigid water, but the stream had become more of a river, widening as it rushed over jagged rocks. She had no way of knowing how deep it was, or what hid below it’s depths, so she decided she needed to walk along the banks, just to be safe. She dragged herself on her stomach, back up over the embankment, wanting to stay as low as possible. Cautiously, she peeked over the top. 

And her heart stopped. 

Dead, milky eyes stared back at her as she lay there, nose to nose with a corpse. It was the same-same  _ creature _ from before. He looked drowned, up close. Waterlogged skin with debris tangled in his ghostly white hair. Oozing black ringed his mouth as he opened it as if to speak, but no words came out, just a low groan as he raised one arm and pointed down the embankment.

His lips moved again and she thought she understood the word he was trying to form. He was trying to warn her. He was telling her-

‘ _ Run.’ _

She reeled backwards, scrambling on her hands and she struggled to get her feet underneath her. She turned tail and ran just as that unholy  _ shriek  _ echoed behind her once again.

The rain slowed to a stop and the clouds were rolling away over the other side of the mountain, revealing a full harvest moon. The wash of moonlight was like a spotlight, illuminating in stark detail the flat land around the river nestled in the peaceful valley she’d made her way into.

It was almost too quiet now and the light made her feel exposed. The  _ drip drip drip  _ of rainwater falling from storm abused leaves and branches seemed impossibly loud. However, there was another sound she recognized now. The sound of cars, off in the distance. Of wet tires on pavement. She must be near the bridge that separated the forest from the town, the one that crossed over the river that continued to flow for hours until it reached the sea. 

A euphoric mix of hilarity, disbelief, and relief made her feel like she was floating as she suddenly got a second wind and broke into a sprint, running full out towards the sounds of civilization.

That was when she saw him, standing just in the shadows of a tree on the far side of the river, just watching. He had been waiting for her. She stumbled as her heart lurched in her chest, but she pushed herself harder; bare feet numb and long since torn to shreds. Just a little farther, she could beat him. 

She ran.

There, ahead, on this side of the river now, he stood in the shade of a large rock fallen from the cliff high above. 

She ran.

Past the rock, she didn’t stop and he wasn’t there, but when she fixed her eyes forward he stood just barely obscured in the shadows on a collapsing old chicken coop, long abandoned by whoever had settled in this valley last. 

She ran. 

Again and again, she saw him but he was never where she looked a second time, always one step ahead of her, between her and her salvation. There was no way. No way he was moving so quickly and she wasn’t seeing him. How was he doing that? There was a stitch in her side, her palms were sticky with congealed blood, sweat stung the abrasion on her forehead, but she ran. 

She ran for her life. 

She didn’t see him anymore.

Dasol burst into a short stretch of trees and out the other side, and there she could just make out the stretch of highway dotted with the occasional street light to mark the hairpin turns. Farther down the slope, the bridge looked like her last obstacle, like if she could cross it he couldn’t follow her anymore. Her eyes scanned the hillside, trying to make out any sign of movement. Nothing. She couldn’t hear anything either. She sprinted as fast as she could towards the highway. She was home free if she could just keep going. It really wasn’t far! 

A pair of strong arms caught her around the waist, like he’d materialized out of nowhere. Dasol screamed, kicking, swinging her fists with all her might even though her legs wanted to give out then and there. She could see the moonlight shining off the wet pavement. God, she had never focused on anything as much as she focused on that wet stretch of pavement. He was stronger than her, holding her effortlessly against his chest as he turned back towards the forest and  _ no! _

She bit him. Hard. Got her hands around the sleeve of his jacket, shoved it up and really laid into his forearm. Blood burst bright across her tongue, tasting like vindication and the most vile thing she’d ever put in her mouth all at the same time. 

He swore and dropped her. Dasol scrambled to get her feet underneath her. She ran for the highway, for the salvation of the bridge. Her feet hit the slick, wet stretch of pavement and she slipped, but she kept going.

She wasn’t going to die here. Not tonight, not this way. Not after everything she’d just gone through to survive. She was going to make it across that bridge, get help, she’d bring the whole town down on his head, the sick freak! She’d-

The squeal of brakes was so loud at first she’d thought it was the corpse boy again, but the bonewhite paleness of the moon high above was suddenly replaced by the yellow of headlights and she threw her arms up out of instinct to protect herself, even though she’d never be able to save herself from the crushing force of the SUV barreling towards her as it hydroplaned across the wet pavement. She screamed one last time, out of sorrow, despair, frustration as the car slammed into her and-

Han Dasol screamed as she fell out of bed, because it hadn’t been real. It was all just a dream.


	2. Chapter 2

Jongho returned the girl to her home, covered head to toes in cuts and bruises, soaking wet and coated in mud and blood. She’d been stubborn. Her terror was strong, but her determination and perseverance hadn’t exactly made her the easy target he’d pictured. 

It had been the last illusion that had finally pushed her over the edge, the terror and despair that had overcome her when she thought her last chance at escape had evaded her; that after all she’d gone through she would die the victim of a fatal car crash. That pure, uncut burst of absolute fright fueled by hope fading fast had been exactly what he was looking for. Her fear had flowed out of her and into him as she lost consciousness and slumped to the ground right there in the middle of the highway.

Jongho had pulled her limp form into his arms and stepped into the shadows of the forest and out of the shadows in the corner of her bedroom. He undressed her with an air of clinical indifference. Nothing about her form excited him and it was a necessary violation of her boundaries to maintain the illusion that would keep her sane. Dressed in a modest t-shirt and a pair of pajama pants, he tucked her under the covers of her bed and then took her hand in his own, palm to palm. 

Taking her pain into himself was easy, a burden he was willing to shoulder as repayment for the gift she had given him. He watched as a especially brutal looking laceration on her forehead healed, knitting together right before his eyes. He hissed as he felt his own forehead split open and a gush of warm blood trickled down around his eyebrow. By the time the bruising around her abrasion faded, his own had already healed, leaving behind nothing but a tender spot on his forehead and a drying smear of blood. He repeated the process, gritting his teeth as his palms rubbed raw and the soles of his feet burst, filling his socks with blood. His body ached with an amalgamation of bruises and aching, abused muscles and joints, but when he was finished, she lay in the bed before him, her breathing much easier in a body that appeared to have never been touched. 

He stood stiffly from the dainty vanity stool he’d pulled to her bedside, sliding it back into place. 

He had just enough energy to step into the shadows and stumble onto the streets below. She would wake in the morning with only the vaguest recollection of the most terrifying dream of her life and no memory of ever even having gone out with him in the first place, let alone her wild flight of terror down the mountainside. She wouldn’t even remember that she’d ever met him. He’d taken everything of himself from her memories. 

The fear she had felt, however, was a part of her very core now, embedded into her flesh in a way that only someone who had been stalked as prey could ever understand. If she were to see him around town she would be afraid. Subconsciously, she would fear him for the rest of her life. A self-preservation instinct that worked very well in his favor, as it kept people who had already served their purpose from approaching him again and risking triggering something deep inside them that might reconnect the synapses he’d destroyed and bring the things he’d done to them back to the forefront of their minds. 

With a wave of his hand, his motorcycle appeared in a curling puff of smoke. 

His ancestors had ridden brooms, but modern times called for modern solutions. It was connected to him, always existing in a plane just out of sight, waiting for him to reach through the veil and summon it. It took much less for him to pull the bike to him than it would for him to step into the shadows and back out. 

Jongho left town just as the sun was rising. A fog of mist and condensation created a thick, sodden cloud that wetted his clothes as he crossed the bridge and climbed the mountain for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. 

Like all of his kind, Jongho didn’t remember who he was before he died. Or even if he  _ had _ died. He supposed he had to have died, or had to have been very near death, to agree to the pact that made him what he was. Part of the deal was forgetting everything about yourself, but what did it matter if you forgot? As long as you continued to live. 

There was a ring on his finger, heavy and cumbersome. An ornate piece of metal with an orange topaz the size of a large grape. That was where it lived. 

As he drove over the hills with the sun just rising, one would not be able to tell if the light that lit the stone came from the fiery star in the sky or from the creature inside. The energy he had harvested from the girl would leave her weak and vulnerable for days. She might fall ill between now and when she recovered but it couldn’t be helped. If he didn’t feed the thing inside he would die, and Jongho had lived too long to die. 

Jongho had never met a vampire before in real life, though there were some like him who claimed that they had and that they were real. Jongho thought that maybe they were just kidding themselves into believing there was a greater evil than them out there, that there was something worse hiding in the shadows. Jongho thought that  _ they _ were the vampires, and that somewhere along the way the legend got twisted and birthed two separate creatures. 

How humans had managed to take what he was a separate it into halves, skew it so that it was almost unrecognizable over time, was something that baffled him to no end, but he supposed humans were as dense as they were fickle, and while a significant portion of the population remembered that the  _ wicche _ were creatures of torment, the Bell Witch for example, or the ones who had caused the chaos that was the Salem Witch Trials.  _ Wicche _ , most commonly known as witches, were now seen by the average person as a fairy tale individual who waved around a stick and shot colorful streams of ‘magic’ at each other like they were guns. Vampires became the other side of the coin, vicious predators that hunted humans and drained them of their life force. 

_ Wicche _ didn’t need a wand to cast their illusions, and what they stole from humans, what they needed to survive, was not their blood; it was their fear. 

Jongho cruised around the curve of a switch back, his bike listing to the side as the sun momentarily blinded him. He swore, turning his head away just for a moment until his visor could darken. When he looked back there was someone standing in the middle of the road and he panicked, instinctually jerking his bike in an effort to swerve and avoid them. 

The bike laid out, skidding across the pavement. He was thrown from the bike, rolled across the pavement like a ragdoll tossed by a careless child. He felt bones break, skin and muscle tear from his body. The bike crashed in a heap on the opposite side of the road and Jongho groaned, coughing up a mouthful of blood from punctured lungs. He couldn’t move. He was fairly certain his spine was broken. He couldn’t even blink. 

The face of the boy from the forest, the Banshee, loomed over him. He was terrifying as he smiled down at Jongho, vindicated. The Banshee seemed content to stand over Jongho and watch him die. Jongho hated to disappoint him, but the burning in his hand, the only part of his body he can feel, told him that the thing inside the ring is already doing its job. It must heal his spinal cord injury first, the bastard, because he could feel the warmth of blood pooling below his body like he hadn’t been able to before and if his lungs had worked he would have screamed from the pain of what he realized must be the shattered bone of his femur jutting through a gruesome tear in his thigh. Just as he was beginning to feel light headed from lack of oxygen, his chest heaved and then he did scream, his whole body jerking and bowing as his bones snapped back into place, one by one. 

Jongho gritted his teeth as the flesh knitted over and he was left panting on the pavement, clothes torn to shreds and covered in too much of his own blood. He felt woozy, knew he had been seconds away from dying of blood loss before the last wound closed, his femoral artery and the numerous internal injuries bleeding out into his abdomen had almost done him in before the demon could do its job and heal his mortal frame. Jongho struggled to his knees and crawled to his bike. 

The banshee scowled and disappeared, but Jongho didn’t care. He made it about halfway before he wretched, vomiting a nasty pool of bile and viscous black blood onto the pavement. His abdomen felt tender and distended and every heave felt like it was going to tear newly healed tissue apart. 

His bike was ruined. He was forced to stumble to his feet and leave it. One of his boots was gone. Gravel, mangled pieces of metal, and sharp pieces of glass tear at the sole of his foot, adding to the abuse he’d absorbed from the girl. He stumbled a few steps into the forest and sighed when the shadows closed over him, closed his eyes, and let himself go into the cool blackness of the Between. He stumbled again when he took a step forward and fell out of the shadows into the depths of his basement. He didn’t make it very far, just a few steps before he fell to the polished concrete and there he lost consciousness. 

He awakened hours later to a complete healed body with just a bit of soreness, but he groaned at the feeling of dried blood flaking off his skin and ruined, stiff leathers. 

The first thing he thought of is his bike. He peeled off his clothes and threw them in the trash. There was no saving them. He took just enough time in the shower to rinse the blood from his body and then he threw on a pair of sweats and a hoodie.

Jongho stood in his front lawn, trying to call his baby to him. The motorcycle doesn’t respond and Jongho despaired to think about how much damage it must have sustained to disrupt the carefully woven enchantments that attached it to him. 

He swore as he opened his garage and took the keys for his truck off their hook on the wall. That damn Banshee. He’d been having trouble with it ever since he’d moved here. At first he hadn’t minded it. It had followed him through the woods while he stalked his prey, only really adding to the terror of the situation as its screams echoed down the mountain. 

Jongho was careful, and he was strong, so he really only needed to take one person every few months. Last night’s victim had been his fifth in a year. Last night had also been the first time the Banshee had actively  _ interfered _ with what he was doing. He’d almost lost her once, by the river. Might have lost her entirely if the damn thing hadn't screamed. At least it couldn’t seem to help that particular compulsion, even as it tried to guide the girl away from him. 

Jongho never killed his victims if he could help it. People feared death, but the fear of death was short lived. Some  _ wicche _ prefered to kill, but he thought they were weak and simple minded. The fear of the chase was the most sustaining. He couldn’t help it, however, if his victims fell off a cliff and broke their necks. 

At first, he hadn’t understood why the Banshee had been attracted to him and what he was doing. It had only taken a few encounters with the creature to realize this one was different from most. Banshee’s were the victims of violent deaths, usually killed by someone they’d loved and trusted, and were harbingers of death themselves. Their scream was a warning; death was coming. But Jongho wasn’t a killer and his victims hardly ever died. 

He backed his truck out of his garage, the heavy mid-afternoon sun filtering down from between the branches of evergreen and deciduous trees alike. The Banshee had been on this mountain for a long time, at least fifty years he’d learned. Most people in the town could hear him. When his scream rolled down from the mountains everyone would freeze, and then someone would laugh and make an excuse, but they would all rush home to check on their loved ones that night, and someone almost always died. 

Except for on the nights that Jongho hunted. 

When Jongho asked, no one could remember how the banshee died. Or rather, no one remembered a death violent enough to warrant the creation of omen such as he. And there was something… odd about the spirit of the boy. Banshee’s were… mindless. They were attracted to death like moths to flames. They never approached people, not until they were moments from passing on, and only then if they were out in the open, far from civilization. One was not likely to open their eyes and see a banshee standing at their bedside like some common ghost. 

But this one… Jongho often saw him standing just at the edge of the forest. Watching him with eyes burning red and a sneer on his lips. There seemed to be an air of almost… anger about him. Hate, even. This morning’s accident was just another thing in the long list of reasons why this particular banshee was a thorn in his side. 

Jongho was half afraid his precious motorcycle wouldn’t be where he’d left it. He might have been one of the only people who actually lived on the mountain, but plenty of people travelled up and down it to visit the hiking trails and the picnic spots, especially throughout the daylight hours. Anyone could have seen it and loaded it up, just the same as he planned to do. 

He breathed a sigh of relief when he spotted it, resting in a hopeless tangle where it had wrapped itself about the base of a tree. He moaned at the sight of it. It might be beyond repair. 

It took some careful maneuvering to get it into the back of his truck. Jongho had to siphon what was left of the gas out of the cracked tank. Afterwards, he set about picking up as many of the scattered bits of torn metal that he could even though he knew it was futile. The stain of blood was rusted and streaked, but with the motorcycle gone from the scene, he hoped people would assume it had come from a deer and not an accident that should have been fatal and left a body behind. 

Just as Jongho was getting back into his truck, he saw him. Standing just at the treeline and watching him, eyes glowing red and that same ugly sneer curling his lip. Jongho slammed the door and started the engine. He didn’t look back as he drove away.


	3. Chapter 3

Jongho was a photographer, by trade. 

Before he’d moved here and settled on this mountain, he’d been fairly well known for his architectural shots. But that Jongho was dead now. He’d lived that life, under a different name, for two decades, give or take, before it had become too difficult to continue on without someone realizing his immortality. He’d even managed to amass a fair amount of fame. On his final night in his last life, he’d hosted a lavish gallery style exhibition of some of his most famous photographs. His death had been rather public, with how he died and all. Of course, it had all been an illusion. 

That was why he’d chosen to move so far south. A small town with an older population and young people who didn’t care much for seeing the rest of the world. For whom thoughts of the city and what happened there were fleeting and only for the holidays, not something for them to be concerned about as they went about their daily lives. 

Jongho loved photography. Time moved so strangely for him that he took great joy in being able to take slices of time and preserve them. It was enjoyable to look back on them when so much time had passed and he’d forgotten what it was like before. 

Today he was up on his mountain, walking along a hiking trail that the locals insisted didn’t exist. The sign at the beginning of the trail was weather worn, the characters so faded that they could barely be read. It read ‘eternal rain’ in hanja that looked suspiciously like the name of a person rather than the name of a place. He fit them in his mouth as he walked, worked them over and over as he snapped pictures of rock formation and placid streams, not really caring for what he was capturing on film but instead just trying to get a feel for the lighting. 

Eternal Rain. Wooyoung.

There was a pond, near the top of the trail. Maybe it was more of a spring. He’d been here once before, but he’d never lingered. It was beautiful. The water was crystal clear and if one stood over the pool and looked down, straight down, it appeared to be a tunnel straight to the middle of the earth. 

A rocky throat filled with ice cold water that seemed to go on forever and ever, until it’s depths became too black and one was left to wonder what lay down there beyond what the eyes could see. There were no fish, no silver darts of life to draw one's attention away from the darkness. Maybe it was due to the coldness of water straight from the core of the mountain, or maybe it was due to something else, that nothing seemed to live in the pool. Nothing lived in the pool, but that didn’t stop it from breathing. If he stood and stared at it, he could almost see the stone walls expand with each inhale and relax on the exhale, though the surface remained placid, like a sheet of glass covered it. Even the breeze that fluttered around the little mountainside clearing that housed the spring didn’t disturb the surface of the water. 

The pool lingered in Jongho’s mind, sometimes, and he wondered how it would photograph. Would he be able to stand over it and snap a picture that truly exposed the depth of it? Or would it seem flat and lifeless when photographed? Would he be able to catch it breathing on film?

There was a rocky outcropping, set just behind the spring like it had been placed there by some ancient god. Too perfect, like a backdrop in a movie. It enticed. Made one feel that if they were to climb up it and jump off at the  _ perfect _ angle they could break through the glass covering the pool and plunge straight down that stone throat to the very heart of the mountain. It was enchanting,  _ hypnotizing _ , to stand on one of the narrow stone ledges and look down, imagine the icy chill of the water starting at your feet and continuing up until it stopped your heart, filled your mouth and froze your lungs. 

Today, Jongho climbed up.

With nothing but his camera strap around his neck, he climbed. The spring had to be photographed from straight above, or no one would ever be able to understand it. It had to be seen, had to be looked at straight in the eye to understand it’s beauty. Like Medusa. Even if it killed you, you had to look.

He didn’t even remember if he actually took any photos before he put the camera down on the tapering stone shelf. All he knew for sure was that it rested near his feet as he stood there, balancing on the rim with the toes of his boots hanging clear off the edge as he looked down at the surface of the water, his fingertips biting into the stone wall that dug into his back sharply, like it was a firm hand trying to decide whether or not it would hold onto his frame or push him. 

Jongho saw something move, down below in the dark depths of the spring. A swaying of white, almost like a swirling of seaweed, bleached by a lack of sunlight. He was fascinated by it, couldn’t take his eyes off of it as it swayed in the still water. It almost looked like… hair.

The bone white stretch of fingers seemed to appear from nowhere, the hand they were attached to just as pale and willowly thin, yet it seemed to exist on it’s own. Just the swatch of hair, a stretch of long fingers, and a slender palm… reaching for him. Swaying in a current that didn’t exist, underneath a surface as smooth as glass. 

Maybe it was the rocks that pushed him, digging into the flesh of his spine as they shoved him from his precarious perch. They must have pushed him, because he didn’t remember letting go, didn’t remember jumping. 

It wasn’t until he hit that glassy surface of the water that Jongho realized that he had been falling through the air. 

It was just as he’d imagined it- breaking that mirror-like surface. 

So cold that Jongho gasped and couldn’t close his mouth quickly enough. He swallowed a mouthful of water, then coughed on instinct, losing the only bit of oxygen he’d managed to take in before the water closed over his head. 

Jongho had always been a fan of swimming. He didn’t remember who he was before he died but sometimes he got the vaguest imprints of memories. When he laid in bed at night, caught between reality and dreams, he found himself standing on the edge of a diving board, poised to plunge into the olympic sized swimming pool below. He must have known how to dive, before, because he felt confident as he cut an arc through the air and into the chlorinated water below. 

In his memories, his path through the water was controlled and his return to the surface was quick. Here, now, it seemed like he would keep going forever. The height and the momentum propelling him deep into the spring until even the light began to fade. He waited, lung screaming for his body to slow. So he could kick up and make his way back to the open air. He kept his eyes fixed upwards, on the shrinking pinpoint of light. He felt himself begin to slow and kicked, arms cutting through the water. Once, twice, before suddenly something clamped around his ankle and  _ jerked _ .

Startled, he looked below him in the dim light, ice cold water stinging his eyes, and saw the grinning face of the banshee boy smiling up at him as he floated in the inky blackness of the pool. The white blond of his hair swayed like seaweed and the waterlogged, bonewhite of his hand wrapped around Jongho’s ankle like a shackle. 

Jongho’s lungs were dying off at this point, the ring on his finger flared to life as the thing that sustained him tried to renew the cells as they burst. Every round of repair took longer and longer until he felt it struggling to repair the damage lack of oxygen was doing to his brain, too. 

The Banshee grinned, reached up and caught him around the waist as it pulled Jongho down, down deeper. It wrapped its arms around Jongho’s waist until it pulled him even, face to face in an ice cold, watery embrace. Trapped in the stoney throat of a great beast, Jongho could hear it’s laughter inside his head. High and delighted, a sharp thing with a bit of a squeak to it that in life had probably been beautiful but in death was maniacal. Those slender fingers curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, twisting painfully as the banshee forced his head back and captured his mouth in a searing kiss that felt colder than even the water.

Jongho groaned, eyes screwing shut against the dreadful cold that seemed to slowly be turning him to ice. The banshee’s lips moved against his and Jongho responded on instinct, oxygen deprived brain going through the motions. The banshee’s laugh echoed in his head once more, as the creature pulled back and grinned at him, leaning forward to nip at his lips before he sealed his mouth to his once more.

And then water began to pour into Jongho’s lungs, straight from the banshee’s mouth and into his own. He struggled, hands locking onto the creature’s shoulders as he struggled to break it’s hold on him. He thrashed, lashing out desperately. He could still die down here, die for a second time. The thing that kept him alive could only do so much, would only be willing to do so much, before the damage would be irreparable and there would be nothing else that could be done. 

There was a crack in the rock. A crevice just beyond his reach filled with shadows and darkness. It looked like home and his salvation all at once. Jongho kicked out behind him. His feet made contact with the slick stone wall of the spring and he pushed, used the force to propel them both forward until the banshee’s back hit the opposite wall and it released him with a hiss.

Jongho shoved his hand into the crevice and,  _ oh _ , the pain. He’d never tried to push himself into the Between through a shadow so small. He imagined it must have felt like going through a trash compactor while still alive. Gruesome and terrible, his shape folded, bent, and cracked. The water in his lungs went with him, into the Between, and he almost gave up. Almost stopped and stayed there in a place where he didn’t belong. If he stayed too long he would forget and he wouldn’t be able to find a door. 

He came out on the other side, in the shadow of a great old oak tree only a few steps from the edge of the pool. Jongho coughed, spraying a vile mist of ice cold water onto the hardpacked ground. His lungs burned and his head spinned. A vessel must have popped in his eye because his vision was tinted red and his ears were ringing like they’d popped and popped and popped. 

Jongho raised his head and looked back towards the spring. 

The banshee was there, just the top of his head and his eyes peeking at him from below the water’s surface. Like a crocodile laying in wait. White blond hair plastered to his head like a skull cap and the corners of his eyes crinkled up in a smile that Jongho couldn’t see, hidden below the surface, like almost killing him was the most fun the creature had had in years. 

Jongho swore and grabbed a rock, chucking it with all his might at the pool. The water rippled and the creature was gone. He swore again thumping his fist against the ground as he coughed. 

He made it halfway down the trail before he got his strength back to travel in the Between again, and then he took that half-step in half-step out and found himself standing at the bottom of his driveway. 

He didn’t even realize he’d forgotten the camera until he saw it waiting for him on the steps of the cabin.

\---

Yang Jaehoon had stayed at the summit for too long - now it was almost nightfall, and the thick mist made it impossible to tell if he was even going in the right direction. Underfoot the path was slippery and sodden. It kept giving way, cascading down the steep drop on either side of the ridge.

A noise was coming from behind the haze. It was the sound of footsteps, and they were getting closer. Louder. Jaehoon stopped to listen, but only now that his own footfalls had ceased, he heard nothing but silence.

When he continued along the path, the footsteps returned. An echo. It was only an echo, he told himself. 

Or so he kept telling himself, right up until a shadowy figure emerged from the edge of the fog, just ahead of him on the path.

Jaehoon stopped, watching the shape of a man. He didn’t move and neither did Jaehoon.

“Hello?” he called.

The figure remained still.

“D-does this path lead to the highway?”

There was no reply.

“Hello? I’m trying to find my way to the parking lot? The big one near the foot of the mountain but I’m afraid I’ve lost my way...”

The figure said nothing. Soon it would be pitch black, and the path was treacherous enough already. After a deep breath, Jaehoon took a few shaking steps forward. There was no one there, in the fog, he told himself. Merely a trick of the fading light. He would walk right back the shape and laugh at himself when he realized it was just a shrub or a tree stump or the signpost he’d been searching for 

As he drew closer the figure began taking shape, stopping Jaehoon dead in his tracks.

He was facing an exact copy of himself. The figure in the fog. 

It was him.

When Jaehoon was young his favorite and most beloved auntie had passed away. In her will he’d left his mother her very extensive collection of porcelain dolls. Jaehoon had hated those things. Whenever he’d gone to visit her he’d endured them because they made her happy, but he was none too pleased to have them in his home. He felt like they were watching him. All the time. No matter where he went he could feel their eyes on him. Cold, lifeless, glass, and always watching. Painted on smiles that seemed sinister when he looked for too long. He hated them. 

There was one doll, a particularly ugly thing that his auntie called by the American name of Mary Grace. She said it was named after the daughter of the man whose estate she had purchased it from, and that the hair on it’s head was the girl’s real hair, cut from her head after her untimely death from influenza. 

The doll terrified him to no end. It stank of sadness, death, and despair. He begged his mother to get rid of it. She hadn’t and all his pleading had done was alert his older brothers to his fear. For a solid year they would torment him. Moving the doll from room to room when he wasn’t looking. He would wake up to it sitting in the chair next to his bed. Walk downstairs to find it waiting for him in the kitchen. Flip on the bathroom light and find it perched on the sink. 

His torment continued until Mary Grace met with an unfortunate end, having fallen from a second story window, her little porcelain head shattered to bits. 

The sky continued to darken as Jaehoon stood motionless. For a long, long time. His counterpart did the same. Jaehoon raised his arms and shook his head - the figure imitated his every move.

Jaehoon didn’t know what to do. This couldn’t possibly be real. Perhaps he had some sort of altitude sickness? Or he’d breathed in the spores of some poisonous forest fungi, causing him to hallucinate? It couldn't be real, and yet, he was afraid. 

The path was too narrow to take a wide berth around his double. There was no way for him to carry on without having to pass right alongside...  _ it _ .

Seeing no other choice, Jaehoon turned sideways and sidestepped along the left side of the ridge. His counterpart hovered over to the right. There was  _ just _ enough space between them for Jaehoon to slip by without touching it.

Rocks came loose and fell into the murky fog below. Jaehoon groaned, feeling sick as he looked down. He’d always been afraid of heights. He shuffled forward a few steps, trying to put some distance between himself and the edge of the ridge. The other him moved forward as well, until they were practically nose to nose. There was something odd about the other him. An almost plastic sheen to his skin. Upon closer inspection his features looked like they’d been painted on and his eyes looked like glass. It was getting colder now, and Jaehoon was trembling.

Barely daring to breath, Jaehoon carefully moved inch by inch. They passed each other by, matching each other step-for-step, Jaehoon moving downhill to the right and his doppleganger moving steadily uphill to the left. Jaehoon kept his head turned, his eyes fixed on the glassy, lifeless counterpart’s gaze. If he reached an arm out he could have touched it. He was afraid to touch it. 

Suddenly, its eyes widened, brightened, and it grinned. Jaehoon stiffened, terrified.

The doppelganger twitched, the first independent movement it had made, and Jaehoon jumped in fright. He almost plummeted over the edge, but managed to land firmly on his ass. Without waiting for his heart rate to return to normal, he climbed to his feet and raced down the mountainside.

Jaehoon stopped mid-step. He couldn’t move a muscle.

All on its own, Jaehoon’s body turned to face his double.

The figure took a single step and Jaehoon did the same. The other Jaehoon strolled forward, it’s terrible grin widening with each stride. Jaehoon mimicked it’s every move.

When they were standing nose to nose once again, its glass eyes bulged out of its skull and its mouth extended from ear to ear as the painted-on finish of it’s plastic skin cracked and flaked away. Jaehoon heard a long, wailing shriek off in the distance.

Powerless to move, all Jaehoon could do was scream in return.


	4. Chapter 4

The missing posters for the hiker that had gotten lost on Jongho’s mountain stayed up much longer than the search parties looked for him, and the search parties looked for him for a long time. So long, that Jongho had to travel to hunt. He made the trek to Jeju and made Hallasan his hunting ground for the night, returned to find his mountain still crawling with volunteers, police, and park rangers on any day that the weather allowed it. 

He joined the search efforts himself. It was his mountain after all. 

It was the banshee that told him where to look, in the end. 

Jongho climbed to the summit, the path Mr. Yang’s girlfriend said he most often liked to take and then he’d climbed back down, looking for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. 

He might have missed it, if it hadn't been for the boy. 

He looked small, standing there on the edge of the ridge. At first Jongho didn’t even recognize him. His hair was dry, a honeyed blond instead of the snow white. His eyes were a warm brown, no longer covered with that milky film of death. The clothes he wore were like new, no longer the waterlogged rags Jongho was used to seeing. When Jongho made eye contact with him the boy didn’t seem to recognize him, he only looked lost and confused. 

He looked sad, standing there with his hands in his pockets, staring down over the edge of the ridge. Cautiously, Jongho moved to stand beside him. The boy looked up at him, a shining shimmer of tears clinging to his eyelashes. Far below, tucked between two rocks, Jongho could just make out the colorful material of Yang Jaehoon’s windbreaker.

The boy’s eyes were still on him, so wide and so impossibly sad. There was a question there, Jongho knew, and so he shook his head. 

“No,” Jongho said, “I didn’t do this.”

The boy wailed quietly, a few tears escaping to drip down his cheeks. Jongho hesitated for just a second before he reached out and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He jerked under Jongho’s touch, looked at Jongho with eyes quickly bleeding to red as his skin paled and his cheeks hallowed, the color leached from his hair and he opened his mouth wide to scream but no sound came out.

And then he was gone. 

Jongho brought the search party whistle to his lips and blew. 

\---

After that day Jongho couldn’t get the boy out of his head. Not the banshee, but the boy himself. The way he’d looked standing there on the mountainside…

Jongho didn’t remember how he died, or even if he did die, though he supposed he must have or must have been close to make the pact he’d made. He didn’t remember his life before immortality, but sometimes he had memories. Disjointed things that came to him in between the moments where reality became dreams. 

There were moments, when he let his mind wander that he could hear the boy’s laugh. Not how it had been deep underwater echoing in his head but not in his ears. He heard it joyous and bright and beautiful as it must have been in life. Glimpses of sun kissed cheeks curled up in delight and honeyed hair blowing in a gentle breeze. 

He thought that maybe they weren’t real, these memories. It was hard for him to know when things were real or not, sometimes. 

But something about this felt real. Or wrong. 

Right?

It felt right, but it was wrong. And he couldn’t be sure it was real. 

Jongho straddled the back of an ATV, his camera raised as he snapped a picture of a roe deer and its fawn. He’d been sitting there for hours, just at the bottom of the Eternal Rain trial. He’d meant to take the road all the way to the top and try to get some panoramics of the sunset, but once he had gotten this far he couldn’t go any farther. 

So he’d sat there, snapping pictures of birds and any other wildlife that crossed his path. 

Waiting.

Other people passed him by. On foot, on mountain bikes, on other ATVs. No one looked his way. Jongho doubted they could even see him, even though he was parked just off the side of the road. He’d suspected since the incident at the pool that Eternal Rain trail only existed when it wanted to exist, and could only be seen by those chosen to see it. 

Like a siren song, it called people to the spring to die. He wondered how many bodies lay at the bottom, drug down to the depths by the banshee.

Banshees weren’t supposed to be able to harm the living. They were a sign, an omen, silent watchers and wailing mourners all at the same time. 

This boy wasn’t a banshee, at least not in the typical sense. He was something else. The magic that kept him bound to this plane was something else. 

Becoming a banshee was a result of a soul being so betrayed in life that it couldn’t move on after death. They felt compelled to linger, stay and try to prevent what happened to them from happening to anyone else. But they weren’t anything more than an echo of their former selves, twisted and warped by their own grief. 

There was a deeper magic at play here. A darker magic. Something more corrupting and depraved than mere betrayal echoing across years. 

A vacuum of despair so deep and so all consuming that it sucked others into death just as the banshee tried to keep death out. Opposing forces, working against each other here on this mountain. 

It was hours before  _ he _ appeared, beckoning to Jongho from the foot of the trail. 

He looked the same as before, like how Jongho had seen him on the ridge that day. Beautiful and sad. 

Jongho walked to him, stood just an arms length away and said, 

“I don’t even know what to call you…”

The boy looked at the sign, battered and faded. 

“Wooyoung?” Jongho asked, looking between the sign and the boy. “The trail is named after you?” The boy nodded. Jongho blinked and the boy, Wooyoung, was gone. No longer standing in front of him. Jongho looked around, startled, and saw him standing farther up the trail, beckoning to him. 

Jongho followed. 

When they arrived at the clearing that housed the spring, Jongho stopped and Wooyoung walked forward. The closer he got to the pool the more color leached from his skin, from his hair, from his clothes until Jongho thought he looked like an old black and white photo come to life to stand before him. Ironic, seeing as how the boy was dead.

Wooyoung turned and looked at Jongho, his hands in his pockets. He looked like he was waiting for something. Jongho hissed, a lancing pain traveling through his temple and into his brain like an iron spike. He’d been here before, seen this before. 

A different day, a long time ago. Wooyoung in bright technicolor on a sunwashed Tuesday afternoon. He didn’t know how he knew it was a Tuesday when he couldn’t even remember if it was a real memory or not. Bare chested, wearing a pair of tiny swim shorts. He laughed as he pushed back his hair, bleached a golden blond by peroxide and the sun. Jongho felt himself smile in response, but not the he that Jongho was now. An echo of himself. 

Jongho stood at the edge of the clearing and Wooyoung stood by the pool, but Jongho also saw himself walking forward. A version of himself that cupped a hand to Wooyoung’s cheek and Wooyoung reached up to hold it there, his head tipped upwards as he smiled, lips moving but Jongho couldn’t hear the words, but he felt the lurch in his chest. Something about the words that Wooyoung said ached. He watched from a distance and also from the eyes of his echo all at the same time as his eyes dropped to Wooyoung’s lips and he leaned forward almost imperceptibly.

He didn’t hear whatever it was that made Wooyoung step back from him, or whatever it was that caused the sadness to come into his eyes, or whatever it was that caused the glum, reluctant smile to curl at the corners of his mouth. He stepped back from Jongho and at the same time Jongho was propelled backwards and kept going, until the echo of himself reached his corporal form and they became one again, but not before he saw the shadow of something terrible walk past and wrap its arms around Wooyoung’s waist, and the longing glance Wooyoung threw over his shoulder at Jongho, one last time. 

Jongho doubled over, the pain in his head overwhelming. 

“Who are you?” he gritted out. “Is this real or are you just trying to lure me back into that pool? So you can kill me? Like you killed the others?”

Wooyoung flinched, like the words physically hurt him and he took a shuffling step backwards. The water lapped at his heels and he jerked as if he’d been electrocuted. Jongho watched as the red bled into his eyes. Wooyoung threw his head back and screamed.

Jongho melted into the shadows. 


	5. Chapter 5

The headaches plagued Jongho for days afterwards and for someone who was wholly unused to feeling pain that he didn’t bring on himself, they were excruciating. The flashes of memory that accompanied them were even more so. 

There were small things. Driving a car listening to the tinny sound of an FM radio station, Wooyoung in the passenger seat beside him. The window rolled down as he rested his cheek on his forearms, eyes closed as the wind blew through his hair.

And there were big things. A long ago night he couldn’t remember the details to, where he opened the door to a tiny apartment and found a crying Wooyoung on the other side. Where Jongho held him against his chest, curled up together on a couch until Wooyoung fell asleep. He didn’t remember why Wooyoung had been crying but he remembered feeling like scum that Wooyoung’s tears had given Jongho so much  _ hope. _

Each memory hurt like hell, physically and emotionally, and left him confused. He called them memories because he didn’t know what else to call them, but he still wasn’t convinced they were real. 

_ ‘You have to wake up’ _

Jongho jerked awake. A face hovered above his own, achingly familiar and for a second he thought he was in the past again. Then he noticed the colorless nature of his cheeks, the way red was already starting to bleed into his irises. 

Wooyoung opened his mouth and screamed.

\---

Lim Chanmi could not stand the sight of birds.

It started when she was a child. Her grandmother had a goose, you see. A surly creature that liked absolutely no one and lived to torment everyone. She didn’t even know why her grandmother had a goose. It wasn’t useful. It was a male goose so it didn’t lay eggs. One goose didn’t supply enough feathers to stuff a pillow, even if you killed it. Her grandma said it ate the bugs and weeds and guarded the chickens. Chanmi didn’t think either of those things were worth the creature’s bad attitude and she tended to avoid it with all she was worth. 

One day the goats got out and her grandmother sent her to round them up out of the far pasture. Just five goats. Two nannies, two kids, and a buck. She tugged on her boots and stomped through the mud with her little goat herding staff, carved just for her by her uncle. It took a solid fifteen minutes to guide the goats back to the gate and once she had, she realized that the bracelet she’d taken from her mother’s dressing table that morning was no longer on her wrist. She’d realized she must have dropped it and Chami panicked, racing back to the far pasture in hopes of catching sight of glittering metal and paste.

What she’d found instead was that damn goose. 

It was like it happened in slow motion. The hiss, something sounding almost demonic to her nine year old ears. The beat of wings like a malevolent, avenging angel. She supposed to an onlooker the honk might have sounded comical but at the time it had stopped her heart. 

That damn goose had chased her from the far pasture all the way to the house, nipping at the back of her thighs and her heels as she shrieked and cried. She still remembered the way everyone around the kitchen table had stood at the window and watched, laughing, as she scrambled to get the back door open. 

Chanmi was twelve when her grandmother died.

The funeral was on a cold, dreary November day and she still remembered how  _ grey _ everything had been. 

Except for the crows. 

The crows that had seemed to follow the hearse from the funeral parlor to the graveyard and then follow the pallbearers as they carried the coffin from the hearse to the ground. 

Everything grey. The grass, the ground, the clouds, the trees, the pallor of the mourners faces. 

But the crows. Streaks of ebony, circling lazily in the air above her head, landing to stare from the tops of headstones, cawing and making her flinch. Her mother kept scolding her for fidgeting, between her tears. 

It had been right at the end, when one of the birds that had been circling overhead made a sudden harrowing dive for the back of Chanmi’s head, causing her to squeal in terror and fall to her knees, arms thrown up to cover her hair as she trembled. 

The bird hadn’t even touched her but for weeks afterwards when she dreamed about them lowering her grandmother’s casket into the ground, the sound of crows was deafening.

Her therapist told her that sixteen was a year of growth. A year to confront her fears. 

She’d started small, by going to the park and feeding the ducks. One loaf of bread once a week until they didn’t seem so scary anymore. Then she’d started bringing a little brown baggy of bread crumbs along with her, too. She would sit on a bench and scatter them on the ground for the pigeons. That one had been terrifying, at first. The way they flocked to her, so many of them. So many beaks and wings and little clawed feet. It had taken months for the panic to stop rising in her chest with every handful she threw out. 

The bird watching journal had been her uncle’s idea. He’d found one just like it in her grandmother’s things a few years back when they’d decided to eliminate one of her old storage units. He’d given it to Chanmi and Chanmi had decided to match her grandmother, bird for bird. 

On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Chanmi climbed the mountain with her two best friends, her boyfriend, and her bird watching journal. 

The first day was amazing. They’d driven to the big parking lot at the bottom where all the best trails started. They’d hiked all day. Talked, laughed, and when they reached a rest area just as the sun was going down they pitched a tent, lit a fire, and told ghost stories late into the night. 

The very next day was worse. She’d gotten up before everyone else. The sun was newly risen and the morning was brisk, damp, and filled with birdsong. Chanmi sat with a mug of tea between her palms and closed her eyes. Birdsong used to set her teeth on edge, make her skin crawl but now she could hear the beauty in it. A gift, she thought, to be able to enjoy it after all this time. 

Early morning was the best time to mark a few of the songbirds she was missing off in her journal. Everyone had stayed up so late the night before, Chanmi decided she could head a ways up the trail by herself. Stick close to the path, enjoy the fresh air, stretch her legs before the real hiking once everyone got up for the day. 

She’d honestly only intended to walk for about fifteen minutes and then head back. Straight up the trail and straight back down. That had been the plan, until she’d caught site of a flash of yellow in the bushes and heard a distinct call that she’d only heard in videos before. A yellow breasted bunting. An endangered species on the Korean peninsula. The sighting of one was rare and a record of its location was absolutely vital for conservation. Moving as slowly as possibly, Chanmi pulled her phone from her pocket in an attempt to snap a picture, lamenting the fact that she’d left her professional camera behind in the tent.  She looked up just in time to see the tiny songbird flitting away into the underbrush. 

Disappointment flooded her chest as she lowered her camera, but then she heard it. The distinct  _ zick  _ of the bird’s call. It was answered in turn with a  _ zick zick zick _ and then a trill of song in a clear  _ tru-tru, tri-tri _ . Her heart leaped when she realized it could be a small colony and she hesitated only for a second before she stepped off the path. 

She followed the calls and the occasional burst of song, flits of yellow just out of her line of sight. Enough to keep her excited, enticed. Finally,  _ finally  _ she saw a spot of yellow on the ground and froze. It was a ground nest with a small clutch of eggs. A female, less bright but still a beautiful yellow and two males perched on the low hanging branches of a shrub. Her hands shook as she snapped the picture, checked the longitude and latitude on her GPS, noted how many eggs were in the nest in her journal. 

It wasn’t until she’d finished logging everything that she’d looked up and realized how high the sun had risen in the sky. She frowned and stood up straight, looking around. She thought she’d walked in a straight line from the trail into the woods but she couldn’t be certain. She  _ had  _ been very focused on following the birds. 

_ Damn it,  _ Chanmi thought. She hadn’t even checked her compass before she stepped off the trail, had no idea if the way back to the campsite was east or west or north or south. Had she gone down or up? Around? She’d been gone for hours, hadn’t she? Why hadn’t she heard anyone shouting for her? She’d been careless, not bringing one of the walkie-talkies with her, but she’d only meant to be gone for a moment, only a few steps from the campsite at most. 

Why had she wandered so far off trail?

Chanmi turned back, trying to follow the signs of her travel through the woods, but she had no idea how to track. You looked for crushed grass and bent sticks, right?

“Hello!” She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled, “Hyeonji! Jungdoo-oppa! Suji-unnie!” 

She waited but there was no response. She pulled out her compass and thought about it critically. If they’d been traveling east up the mountain yesterday, and she turned left when she went off trail, that should have been north, right? So to get back she needed to head...south? 

She turned until the needle pointed south and started to walk. None of it felt familiar, but then again she’d been so focused on the birds that she probably wouldn’t be able to recognize any landmarks, anyway. 

She felt confident this was the right way, and even if it wasn’t, even if she couldn’t find  _ the  _ trail, she would find  _ a _ trail. 

Eventually. 

The longer she walked, the less sure she was. Maybe instead of trying to find the trail she should be trying to get off the mountain? It had taken them almost all day to hike this far yesterday, and she’d wasted half the day already wandering around like this. If she was going to go down she needed to go west, right? 

But when she turned west and started to walk she felt uneasy when the ground seemed to slope up. 

“Jungdoo-oppa!” She called out again. Her voice cracked, but she ignored it. The same way she ignored the tears of panic and frustration that pricked at the corners of her eyes. 

It would take too long to get down the mountain, she needed to find the trail. She needed to head south. 

As soon as she turned back, Chanmi could feel it. 

The presence. A chill. She didn’t know what, but she knew that something was there. Behind her.

A tingle in over her left shoulder. And then claws, gently pressing. Talons. Curling over the fabric of her jacket, pinching but not ripping. 

Goosebumps flared up and down her arms, but for some reason Chanmi didn’t dare turn her head. 

Chanmi didn’t panic. She remembered the tip her grandmother had given her, after that ill-tempered goose chased her across the pasture. If you walk, it won’t chase you. If you show no fear, if you don’t run, it doesn’t see you as prey. So she walked, breath stuttering in her chest, as talons pressed into her shoulder. She could have sworn she felt the brush of feathers against her cheek, but she didn’t look. 

She walked. She went slowly, deliberately. 

A deep breath. 

“Jungdoo-oppa! Hyeonji! Suji-unnie!”

The presence grew colder in anger. The talons weighed heavily on her left shoulder. 

She kept her eyes straight ahead, even as she felt the sharp sting of a beak, scraping against her scalp as it pulled a clump of hair free. It stung and she couldn’t help the little moan of pain that escaped her throat.

The claws pierced her jacket and tore at her skin. Pain flared, and Chanmi bit her tongue. 

She could feel the blood pouring down her shoulder and pooling in her armpit, dripping down her sleeve to drop from her fingertips. 

In the branches above she heard them. Fluttering wings and the scrape and clatter of talons on branches. 

A cold sweat broke out on her brow but she didn’t look. Not up at the branches and not over her shoulder. Another clump of her hair was torn free and this time she couldn’t stop herself from reaching up and swatting at the place where it stung, but there was nothing there. 

Her therapist said that most phobias are defined as  _ ‘a conditional reflex or learning gone wrong’ _ . So wasn’t it possible that this was all in her head? Her panic of being alone in these woods, manifested as the one thing she feared most. The blood and the burning in her scalp was the result of branches and thorns and the birds in the trees were just birds, if they were even there at all. 

She stumbled around a tree that blocked her path and almost gasped in relief when she saw the trail. The talons left her shoulder, the heavy weight disappearing as soon as the well worn path came into sight. She ran down it, down the mountain, hopefully towards the parking lot where she’d be able to find the emergency phone that would let her contact the park rangers. They’d be able to find her friends and let them know she was safe. There was no way she was going back in there, not even up the clearly marked trail. No way. No.

She turned a sharp corner in the trail and stopped when she saw a man standing there. He looked pleasant enough. Tall, dressed in hiking gear with a smooth, clean face and nicely styled hair.

“Sir!” She almost sagged in relief, “Does this trail lead to the parking lot? How far is it?” 

He didn’t answer. 

“Sir?” 

She took another step forward and that’s when she noticed his eyes. They weren’t human. They were yellow, like a birds. Like a raptor. And his hands were like claws, fingers ending in talons caked in carnage. 

He opened his mouth and shrieked like a bird of prey. Before Chanmi could even blink he was upon her. She screamed and cried, tried to fight him off as his clawed fingers tore at her face and her arms. She kicked, trying to knock him off, push him away, but it was futile and as her hysteria grew her body failed her and she found herself going limp, just for a second, and that was when those deadly talons flashed out, slashing her throat. 

She choked, as blood gurgled up between her lips and she laid there stunned. 

The man loomed over her, birds eyes glowing as he watched her die, a sick smile playing on his lips-

“HEY!”

Someone shouted, and then the bird-man was gone. Just like that he melted from sight and the sound of running filled her ears, but she didn’t care. She was fading fast. Bleeding out onto the hard compact dirt of a hiking trail. Mauled by a monster straight out of her worst nightmare. 

A sad, keening wail filled the air and for a second Chanmi thought it was coming from herself, but she didn’t know how such a sound could come from her ruined throat. 

A man appeared, kneeling beside her in the dirt. His lips were moving but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. She was fading fast, she was going to pass out any second, she-

  
  


“HEY!” Jongho shouted. 

Only seconds before he had taken Wooyoung’s hand and let him lead him into the Between; into the shadows of the corner of his bedroom and out onto a mountain trail. 

Jongho hadn’t been sure what he’d been seeing at first. A man who looked disturbingly familiar, crouched over a young girl as she stared up at him out a face covered in blood, eyes wide in abject horror. The minute Wooyoung laid eyes on them he went full banshee and screamed, but the man was already gone. 

Jongho rushed to the girl’s side and the second he reached a hand out to touch her he felt it, the residual energy. Like a stain. That man was like him, another  _ wicche _ .

Wooyoung appeared next to Jongho and looked at him with pleading eyes. 

“I don’t-” Jongho shook his head. “I don’t know if I can help her. I’m not the one who did this, I might not be able to…” but one look at Wooyoung’s face and he knew he had to try. 

Jongho had never taken an injury onto himself that he hadn’t caused before. Didn’t even know if it was possible, but he tried. He took her hand in his and closed his eyes. 

It started with the little injuries as it always did. The puncture marks on her shoulder and irritated patches on her scalp, but he pushed through it. He needed to hurry through this part, let his power build up inside of her until it reached the fatal wound on her neck. It was almost too late. Her pulse was thready and weak, her skin already too pale, too cool. 

When his throat ripped open the pain was unimaginable. He tried to gasp but it caught in his throat, a bubble of blood bursting from his lips, seeping from his nostrils. Jongho looked up and met Wooyoung’s eyes. Couldn’t help the terror that clawed at his chest as the gashes took longer than he expected to heal. Blood coated the collar of his t-shirt, poured down his chest, and Wooyoung scrambled to grab his free hand. His lips moved like he wanted to comfort Jongho, but nothing he said reached Jongho’s ears. 

The girl gasped, her chest heaving as the wounds on her neck closed up completely and she finally drew a full breath. Wooyoung squeezed his hand. The mutilated mess that was Jongho’s throat closed over and as soon as he could speak again he fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone. 

“I’d like to report an injured hiker.” He wheezed, voice like gravel. He pulled the GPS from her belt and rattled off the coordinates. Jongho stayed with her, and Wooyoung stayed with him. He watched her, in the deep spell of sleep his powers put her under, until he heard footsteps running up the hill and Wooyoung disappeared between one blink and the next. He stumbled to his feet and retreated into the shadows at the treeline. Jongho waited until the paramedics reached her, and then he stepped into the Between.


	6. Chapter 6

After that day Wooyoung came to Jongho more often than the memories did. He seemed drawn to Jongho, but he couldn’t always stay and he didn’t always seem sentient. He couldn’t speak, Jongho had figured out that much by now. But he would point. Mime. Sometimes he looked at Jongho like he was waiting. Jongho didn’t know what for. 

Jongho found himself talking to Wooyoung even though Wooyoung couldn’t talk back, and Wooyoung always watched and listened, wide eyed and expressive. But sometimes when he talked he’d look back and see that Wooyoung wasn’t listening. Wooyoung would be staring off somewhere in the distance, pale and drawn where moments before he’d been bright and responsive. Seconds later he would disappear and Jongho couldn’t help but wonder where he went. Was someone dying and he’d been drawn to their death? Had someone else been drawn to the spring and he’d gone to ensure their untimely end? 

When Wooyoung wasn't there the memories came back. 

Except this time they weren’t just flashes of Wooyoung. Now they featured the same shadowy figure he’d seen that day when Wooyoung led him to the spring. With each memory the figure became clearer and clearer. A man, maybe about their age but a little bit older. Jongho hadn’t been sure at first, until he’d heard the echo of ‘hyung’ coming from his own lips when he spoke to Wooyoung and saw that word shaped on Wooyoung’s own when he looked at the shadow figure. He’d figured out that much. Jongho was the youngest, Wooyoung was in the middle, and whoever the shadow was, he was the oldest. 

If the memories were real, if they were true, the shadow was also Wooyoung’s lover. The memories showed them together. The form of a man. Large but not heavy. Tall. Muscular and strong. Big hands that seemed to always be all over Wooyoung in Jongho’s memories, making Jongho grind his teeth together, making his heart ache in his chest with longing, and something angry and jealous and shameful burn in his stomach. Envy. And guilt that he couldn’t just be happy for his friend. 

Jongho saw all this, felt all this, but he could never see the man’s face. 

It frustrated him. He knew if he could just see his face that it would all click into place. 

The idea first occurred to him after he awoke from a dream, or a memory, whatever, and Wooyoung hadn’t been there. He’d been there before Jongho had fallen asleep. Curled up in the chair next to his bed. Eyes soft as he watched Jongho drift off the sleep. His lips had been moving, almost like he was singing…

There was a part to Jongho’s abilities, another gift given to him by the thing that lived in the ring. It was what let him read people. It let him look inside their minds and pluck out their deepest, darkest fear so he could turn it against them. 

It occurred to him again, when he was in his kitchen chopping up vegetables and a memory of something achingly similar wouldn’t leave his mind. The two of them in that small apartment in his mind, Wooyoung sitting across from him stealing bits of radish when he thought Jongho wasn’t looking. 

Maybe he could push it one step deeper. 

Wooyoung didn’t come back for almost a week, but when he did Jongho was ready. 

“I know there’s something you’re waiting for. Something you want me to remember…” Jongho said, standing across the room from Wooyoung. “I want to try something…”

He sat down on the floor and waited. Wooyoung seemed nervous, but eventually he sat across from him on the floor. Jongho held out his hands, palm up, and Wooyoung hesitated. 

Sometimes they could touch. It was like touching someone's hands after they’d been out in the cold for a bit too long. Sometimes when they touched Wooyoung would change, like he couldn’t help it. And it was obvious that he didn’t want to. They would touch and then he would change and it would be the closest form to the Wooyoung who had tried to drown him. Deathly pale with water dripping down from wet hair. It was terrifying, but they had to try.

Wooyoung laid his hands in Jongho's palms and Jongho closed his eyes. 

  
  
  


“Wooyoung-hyung!” 

Wooyoung smiled, turning to see Jongho jogging to catch up with him on the sidewalk outside the grocery store. 

“I thought you were working?” Wooyoung laughed, accepting his hug easily. 

“I am, but I saw you leaving and wanted to say hello.” Jongho grinned. His stockboy apron hung around his waist, dusty in a few places from where he’s been hauling around boxes in the backroom. 

“Well you caught me.” Wooyoung said, reaching up to pinch Jongho’s cheeks and ruffle his hair. 

Jongho had been one year below him all through school, but he’d been his best friend since he was twelve. It wasn’t until Wooyoung’s senior year that things had started to change between them. Maybe if things had been different they might have been something more. But Wooyoung had gone to college in the city and by the end of his first semester he’d met someone. 

There was just something about Taehwan. A sort of endless fount of charisma that drew people in. He’d been the TA in one of Wooyoung’s classes. By the end of his second he was his boyfriend. 

When Wooyoung came home for the summer Jongho had come over the first day and Wooyoung had felt only a little but guilty when he told him about Taehwan. Jongho was handsome and popular. He would move on. That’s what he told himself.

A car horn honked and Wooyoung looked over his shoulder, his face splitting into a wide smile.

“Hyung!” He called, waving his hand over his head happily. 

Taehwan stepped out of the car, unfolding to his full 190 centimeters. He joined him on the sidewalk, wrapped an arm around Wooyoung’s shoulders and grinned at Jongho. 

“How’s it going, little man?”

Jongho rolled his eyes and Wooyoung frowned. They didn’t get along, the two of them, and Wooyoung hated it. He loved Taehwan and Jongho was his best friend. More than anything he wanted them to get along, but it was like they were always making these little jabs at each other. 

Wooyoung laid a quelling hand on Taehwan’s chest. 

“Be nice.”

“Relax, babe. He knows I’m just kidding. You’re the short one around here.” He grinned, and dug his fingers into Wooyoung’s ribs. Wooyoung shrieked and tried to wiggle away, but Taehwan’s arm around his shoulders kept him tucked firmly to his side. “Jeez, bring it down a few decibels. That laugh is gonna blow out my eardrums one of these days.”

Wooyoung laughed again, but quieter this time. He couldn’t help the way the comment made him feel a bit self-conscious. 

“I’m not short,” He rolled his eyes, “Since when is 173 centimeters short?” 

“Anyone shorter than 182 is short to me, baby.” Taehwan patted him on the ass and Wooyoung couldn’t help but glance at Jongho. He was looking away, back towards the grocery store. He rubbed the back of his neck as he seemed to look anywhere but at them.

“Ah, hyung, I have to go back inside. My break’s almost over. I’ll call you tonight, if you’ll be home?” 

“I probably won’t be home tonight. We were gonna go out for dinner and then I was gonna stay over at Taehwan’s rental. My parents don’t really like it when he comes around, you know? They’re still not okay with the whole me liking men thing. They don’t want to see it. If they can’t see it, it’s not real.” He rolled his eyes. 

“Okay,” Jongho frowned, “Call me when you get home. I know your mom is always happy to see  _ me _ .” 

Wooyoung sighed again as he watched him head back into the store. 

“That kid really is a piece of shit.” Taehwan muttered, tapping a cigarette from the box in his breast pocket. Wooyoung tried not to cringe and he lit it, blowing smoke down the street that blew right back into Wooyoung’s face when the breeze changed direction. 

Taehwan never seemed to care what people thought of them. He walked down the street with his arm slung around Wooyoung’s shoulders, ignoring all the sneers and sideways looks. His confidence, his absolute assurance about himself and his place in the world was part of what drew Wooyoung to him. If he sometimes was a bit blut, a bit harsh with his words, then that was something Wooyoung could learn to live with. 

They walked past the community bulletin board and Wooyoung stopped. There were five flyers now, when just last week there had only been three. Five missing people since the summer began. It was disturbing, for a town that hadn’t had so much as a breaking and entering in the last twenty years. 

“Come on, babe. We have reservations.” Taehwan tugged him away.

“It’s just so sad,” Wooyoung shook his head. “We just saw Sunsoo last week, remember?”

“Which one was he?” Taehwan asked, dropping his cigarette butt to the sidewalk, grinding it under the heel of his boot. Wooyoung picked it up and dropped it in the trash. 

“The bank teller. I went to school with him. His dad owns the bank and he’s working there over the summer. Or he was…”

“Oh yeah, the guy with the hair.” 

Wooyoung laughed, “Everyone has hair.”

“Yeah, but his was really nice. I liked the way he styled it. Natural.” He reached up and tugged on one of Wooyoung’s bleached blond locks. “I prefer natural.”

Wooyoung’s hands raised to his hair automatically, but he ignored the comment, just like every other time Taehwan had made it. 

“Do you think they’ll find them?”

Taehwan chuckled, “Why wouldn’t they?”

  
\---  
  


“Do you remember the summer we first met?” Jongho whispered, like he was afraid to disturb the stars overhead. The two of them were laying in the back of Jongho’s dad’s truck, a six pack of cheap beer between them. “At the pool?”

Wooyoung rolled over and tucked his hands under his cheek. He smiled as he took in Jongho’s profile, backlit by the moon high in the sky overhead. 

“You were the first person I saw when I walked in. It was like fate, seeing you soar off that diving board with absolutely no fear. I was terrified, but then I saw you come up smiling. How old were you then? Eleven? You taught me how to swim.”

“And you tried to drown me twenty times before I did.” Jongho turned his head and smiled. Wooyoung tried not to blush, but Jongho still had a bit of an effect on him. He was so handsome, and charming. So witty. And the way the arm of his t-shirt rolled up to expose a strip of strong, sculpted bicep didn’t help either. “You never did tell me why you were so afraid of the water, hyung.”

“Not everyone is born part fish like you, Aqualad.” Jongho rolled his eyes and Wooyoung huffed, “My uncle fell off a fishing boat when I was five.” Wooyoung said, “He never came back. After that I kept having these terrible nightmares about drowning. What it would look like, feel like, what my last thoughts would be. Pretty morbid, right? My mom said for a long time she couldn’t even get me to take a bath, said I was terrified but I don’t really remember that part. All I know is by the time I stopped having the nightmare, I was too afraid to learn how to swim.”

“Ironic that you ended up with a competitive swimmer for a friend.” Jongho chuckled. 

“I don’t think it’s ironic at all.” Wooyoung murmured. “Destiny maybe. Fate. You push me, Jongho. Make me a better person. You never let me feel comfortable being stationary. I don’t know who I’d be without you. You’re my best friend.”

“Hyung,” Jongho breathed, “Wooyoung, I-”

“Please.” Wooyoung closed his eyes. “I can’t. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

“Hyung-” Jongho raised up onto his elbow and reached for him. Wooyoung flinched away. “Please.”

“I already know how you feel, Jongho. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t even be here. Taehwan would be upset if he knew.”

“Does he know?”

“No, I didn’t tell him. But I didn’t need to. I think he could tell just by looking at you.” Wooyoung pushed himself to his feet and hopped over the side of the truck bed. He pulled open the passenger side door and turned back to look at Jongho. 

“Take me home, Jongho-yah.”

\---

There were only five days left until the end of summer break, then he and Taehwan would be heading back to the city for the new semester. It was a bit of a relief, actually, and Wooyoung felt terrible thinking that way. The entire town was under lockdown. The number of disappearances had risen to eight and two bodies had been found. One who seemed to have accidentally locked herself in the crawlspace under her family’s home, and the other at the bottom of the ravine. The only thing was, the first victim’s family claimed there was no way she’d gone under the house by herself as she was terribly claustrophobic. And the other was Sunsoo, who Wooyoung knew for a fact was terrified of heights. There was no way he walked close enough to the edge of the ravine to fall on his own. 

The police suspected foul play. Any day now more bodies would start showing up, they said. Or someone else would go missing. No one was supposed to be out after dark and no one was supposed to go anywhere alone. 

To take their minds off things they were having a movie night over at Jongho’s apartment. Jongho’s parents worked overseas in Japan and had decided that paying a monthly rent on a small flat was a better idea than letting an eighteen year old high school senior have free reign of the utilities of a full sized house. They’d also gifted him a VCR as a graduation present and all of their friends were very impressed by it. Wooyoung had even gone to the next town over where they had a movie rental store and rented  _ Love Story _ on one of those VHS tapes even though not a single one of them spoke english except Taehwan, who had learned in the army. 

The movie was terribly romantic and so sad, even with the poor quality subtitles. He and Seungsuk cried all over each other before it was over while everyone boo’d and threw popcorn at them. Jongho discreetly handed Wooyoung a tissue when no one was looking. Things were still a bit awkward between them, but he meant too much to Wooyoung to just cut him off, no matter what Taehwan said. 

“He thinks you’re pathetic. You know that, right?” 

It was getting late and Wooyoung was cried out, sleepy, and ready to go home. Taehwan had gone to the bathroom ten minutes ago and hadn’t come back so Wooyoung had gone looking for him. He froze just outside the kitchen door when he heard Taehwan’s voice. Who was he talking to?

“You’re wrong.”

Wooyoung covered his mouth with both hands when he heard Jongho’s voice, stifling a gasp. 

“He feels  _ sorry _ for you. You’re just a little kid with a crush to him. He wanted a  _ real  _ man. The only reason he plays along, drags his ass over here and sits on your couch and eats the food your daddy bought for you is because he doesn’t want to make you cry.” Taehwan laughed and the sound was mean. 

“That’s not true.”

“Why don’t you ask him? We can ask him right now. Who does he want, me or you? What do you think he’ll say.”

Jongho didn’t answer.

“You stay the fuck away from him, Choi Jongho. After we leave at the end of the week you forget you ever knew him. Don’t call him. Don’t write to him. And when we come back over winter break don’t come around. He’s mine and I don’t like to share. Especially not with snot-nosed little brats who just stopped wetting their pants yesterday, who can’t stop sniffing around where they’re  _ not wanted _ . You’re a vile little piece of  _ shit  _ and Wooyoung is lucky he never gave you the time of day.”

“Taehwan!” Wooyoung said, shocked. He stepped around the corner and into the light. Wooyoung was dumbfounded by the ugly, twisted expression of Taehwan’s face, but most of all he was upset by the light of cruel humor he saw in his eyes. Like he thought the look of anger and despair on Jongho’s face was  _ funny. _

“You need to leave.” Wooyoung pointed at the front hall. 

“Get your coat, I’ll drive you home.” Taehwan said. 

“No. You need to leave. I’m staying here. I-I can’t  _ believe _ -” Wooyoung shook his head. “I don’t want to see you right now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” 

For just a split second Taehwan looked like he was going to argue. That ugly, twisted expression was back and he opened his mouth like he was going to argue, but then he smiled and it was gone. 

“Alright. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” As he walked past Wooyoung he stopped and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. Wooyoung allowed it, begrudgingly. “I love you.”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, hyung.” Wooyoung repeated, eyes fixed firmly ahead. He didn’t move until he heard the front door close and knew he and Jongho were alone. “I never said any of that to him. None of that was true.”

“That guy is a fucking creep, hyung.” Jongho spat. 

“He’s not. He’s just- he’s just possessive. I told you, it was easy for him to see that you had feelings for me-”

“I love you. I don’t just have feelings for you. There’s a difference.”

“See this is what I mean!” Wooyoung threw his hands up. “You can’t just say stuff like that to me! No wonder Taehwan-hyung feels threatened.”

“So it was okay for him to talk to me like that?”

“No, he should never have said those things to you. I’ve never heard him talk like that before.”

“Bullshit.” Jongho shook his head, his movements jerky. “He talks to you like that all the time. I hear him. He just hides it better. He talks down to you. He thinks just because he’s older than you he knows everything-”

“What twenty-seven year old doesn’t know more than a nineteen year old? He’s just trying to help me. He worries.”

“Yeah, about your hair, your laugh, your  _ weight _ . You don’t need to lose weight, Wooyoung-ah, but he’s got you on that  _ ridiculous  _ diet.”

“It’s not ridiculous it’s healthy!”

“Did he even let you have any popcorn tonight?”

“I already had a snack before we left!”

“And why doesn’t he have to follow this diet?”

Wooyoung shook his head angrily, “He’s bigger than I am! Jongho-yah, this is crazy. I’m sorry he hurt your feelings but he’s a good guy. You’re overreacting. He’s never done anything to hurt me, never raised a hand to me or even raised his voice. I love him, Jongho.”

Jongho blanched, “No you don’t.”

“I do.” Wooyoung insisted. “And when we go back to Seoul we’re moving in together. If you can’t accept that then maybe he was right. Maybe you should just not contact me for a while. Until you can be happy for me.”

“Wooyoung, no, please don’t do this. Please, just think about this for a minute. Hyung, there’s something not right about him. Everyone knows it. Seungsuk and I were talking about it earlier-”

“So now you guys are talking about me behind my back?”

“No!” Jongho cried, taking a desperate step towards Wooyoung. He wrapped his hands around Wooyoung’s shoulders and tried to get him to look at him. “Hyung, Seungsuk told me that Taehwan came on to him. He was asking me what he should do about it. He told me that Taehwan said you cheated on him, that he was planning on leaving you as soon as you got back to the city. When it wouldn’t be awkward.”

“You’re lying.” Wooyoung shoved Jongho’s hands off his shoulders, disgusted. “Wow, I can’t believe this. You really are pathetic. If that was true then why didn’t Seungsuk say anything earlier?”

“He was going to, but I didn’t know you were bringing Taehwan with you tonight. It was supposed to just be us, the old group getting together one last time before we all had to split up again. But then he walked in and we didn’t know what to do.”

“How convenient.” Wooyoung rolled his eyes, “Honestly, fuck you Choi Jongho. I never thought you’d do something like this. I’m using your phone to call a taxi. I’m going home. And I don’t want to hear from you or see you again before I leave. Do you understand me? We’re through.”

“Hyung-”

“Don’t call me that!” Wooyoung spat. “Don’t talk to me. Just leave me alone, Jongho-ssi. Leave me alone.”

Wooyoung called the taxi company from the phone in Jongho’s living room and waited for it outside on the sidewalk.

When he got back to his apartment he cried himself to sleep. 

  
\---  
  


Taehwan had rented a cabin on the mountainside for the summer. Wooyoung spent his last night of summer vacation there, like he had so many other nights. Except for that last night he woke up and Taehwan wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t in the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room. 

“Hyung?” Wooyoung called, standing on the front porch. The moon was full and bright, Wooyoung could see all the way to the trees, which was the only reason he saw Taehwan’s retreating back as it disappeared behind a spruce. “Taehwan?” He called out again, but he must have been too far to hear him. 

Wooyoung knew he should just go back to bed. Whatever Taehwan was doing was none of his business, but there was something about him sneaking out in the middle of the night that didn’t sit right with him. Wooyoung couldn’t help but remember what Jongho had said, just four nights ago. About Seungsuk claiming that Taehwan had made a pass at him. What if… what if he was going to meet someone one last time before they left in the morning? 

Wooyoung had to know. He had to know, before he left with Taehwan in the morning and they moved in together. Before he left town and seriously followed through with cutting Jongho, his oldest friend, out of his life over this man who claimed to love him. 

He pulled his bathrobe tighter and slipped his feet out of his house slippers and into his sneakers before he could talk himself out of it. 

Wooyoung hurried into the forest after Taehwan, hoping he hadn’t gone too far for Wooyoung to follow him. 

He saw him just up ahead and followed as quietly as he could. Once, he was afraid he’d lost him, but the next corner Wooyoung rounded he almost walked right out in front of him.

Taehwan stood in a clearing Wooyoung recognized well. It was the spring where the local kids went swimming in the summers, where the water was clear and cold. He remembered the first time he’d let Jongho convince him to come here. He’d be fifteen and Jongho had been fourteen. The seemingly never ending depths of the pool had been terrifying to him, but Jongho had promised he wouldn’t let him go. He’d guided them into the water, held him close while he encouraged him to tread water, until Wooyoung finally relaxed enough to lay back and float. 

There was someone else there, now. A girl. Wooyoung recognized her as one of the librarians from the little public library on the square, Chunsa. 

Wooyoung watched from just beyond the trees as Taehwan cupped her cheeks and leaned down like he was going to kiss her. Wooyoung covered his mouth to muffle his sob, turning away because like hell he was going to stand here and watch his boyfriend cheat on him. He turned to walk away, determined to go back to the cabin, pack his things, and call a taxi. 

Then the screaming started. 

Wooyoung whipped back around, eye’s wide. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. 

It was Taehwan and Chunsa, but something was wrong. There was a dark sort of… mist curling up from the ground around them. Taehwan still had his hands curled around her face but Wooyoung saw now that Taehwan’s hands were gripping much too tight, blanching the skin around where his fingers dug into her flesh and Chunsa was screaming, a sound of pure terror as  _ spiders _ seemed to pour out of the sleeves of Taehwan’s jacket, swarm down his wrists and over his hands to cover her head, her face, her neck. She screamed and struggled, hands clawing at his arms and she fought to break his grip, but her hands only came alway covered in more spiders. Big ones, small ones, crawling over her in a blanket so think Wooyoung couldn’t even recognize the clothes she was wearing anymore. 

Taehwan released her and she dropped to the ground, shrieking and wailing as she rolled about swatting at the arachnids. Taehwan crouched down on the ground and laughed, a deep booming laugh that echoed through the clearing mixed with her screams. 

“Help me!” Chunsa sobbed, clinging to Taehwan’s pant leg. “Please, help. Please!” 

A spider crawled into her mouth and she gagged, choked, spat and shrieked. 

“You want me to help you?” Taehwan chuckled. 

“Please!” She sobbed. 

“Alright.” He shrugged.

He reached out and snapped her neck. Casual. The same way one might point to their favorite item on a menu; without really even looking, not paying attention at all. She slumped to the ground, dead, and the spiders disappeared like they’d never even existed in the first place. 

Wooyoung screamed. He couldn’t help himself, it just bubbled out of his chest like a bottle of shaken soda. It escaped between his fingers but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because his hands flew up to clutch at his hair as he dropped to a crouch, shocked. 

“Wooyoung?” Taehwan’s voice called. “Baby? Is that you?”

Taehwan appeared in front of him, as if he’d stepped out of thin air. 

“You killed her…” Wooyoung whimpered, “She’s dead. You killed her! What did you do that?!”

“Shh, Wooyoung. Please, listen to me!” Taehwan said, clutching Wooyoung’s cheeks the same way he’d held Chunsa not moments ago. Wooyoung remembered the spiders and he screamed, knocking his hands away. 

“Don’t touch me! Oh god, you  _ killed _ her, Taehwan! She’s dead!”

“I had to, I had to kill her please let me tell you. It’ll all make sense when I tell you, you just have to listen.” Taehwan grabbed onto Wooyoung’s shoulders and pulled him into his lap. 

“No, I don’t want to listen, you’re a murderer. Jongho was right, I never should have trusted you. Let me go!” Wooyoung thrashed, trying to escape the iron vice of Taehwan’s arms. 

“Look, look!” Taehwan held his hand up in front of Wooyoung, showed him the large ring with the blood red gemstone he always wore. A family heirloom, he’d said. He never took it off. “Just watch.” 

“You’re crazy, watch what? What am I supposed to see-”

But then there was a woman standing in front of them. She was stunningly beautiful. The hanbok she wore was ornate in pattern and style, but worn scandalously loose; the ties undone and her breasts near exposed. Her skin was pale, like milk or clouds on a bright summer’s day. Her eyes glowed, a brilliant red like the color of freshly spilled blood and they matched the color of her lips, where a delicate pink tongue darted out as she licked at a set of glistening fangs.

“Oh, he  _ is _ delicious…” She purred. “Taehwan, you’ve been keeping him from me? Let me have him…”

“No.” Taehwan said firmly. “He’s mine. I’m keeping this one. You can’t have him, Jinnyun.” 

“Boo, you’re no fun.” She pouted. “Don’t call me again unless you have a gift for me.”

She disappeared in a curling puff of red smoke. 

“What the fuck was that? Who-who the hell was she?” 

“She’s my patron. I’m a  _ wicche _ .”

“Witch? You’re a w-witch?” Wooyoung repeated, mouth fumbling around the unfamiliar word. 

“Not a witch, a  _ wicche _ .”

Wooyoung shook his head, “You’re not making any sense!” He shoved himself out of Taehwan’s lap. “I don’t know who the hell that was, but I know you’re just fucking with me. Both of you! I-I’m leaving, please let me go I won’t t-tell anyone I swear. Just let me go.”

“Hush, Wooyoung, I’m not going to hurt you I swear. I love you!” 

“No!” Wooyoung, picked up a branch and swung it at him, “Leave me alone! Just let me go!”

Wooyoung ran into the clearing without thinking, but then screamed and stopped short when he saw Chunsa’s body, empty eyes staring up at the night sky; already gone cold and flat. 

He turned and ran straight into Taehwan’s chest, who wrapped his arms around Wooyoung and held him close. “Don’t look, baby, I’m sorry. I had to. It’s what keeps me alive. I’d die if I didn’t.”

“I d-don’t understand- I don’t-”

“I’m immortal. As long as I keep killing I’ll live forever. You can, too. I can make you like me, Wooyoung, and then we can be together. Forever.” He buried his nose in Wooyoung’s hair and whispered, “Wouldn’t you like that? Don’t you want to stay together forever?”

“You’re not making any sense!” Wooyoung said, beating his fist against his chest. “You’re insane, please just let me go!”

“I can't,” Taehwan said, and his voice sounded almost mournful. “I can’t let you go.” 

He began to shuffle forward, Wooyoung still tucked against his chest.

“What are you doing?” Wooyoung asked as he stumbled over the tree branch he’d dropped. He turned his head and noticed that they were moving in the direction of the spring. “Taehwan, what are you doing? Let me go!”

“I can’t.” Taehwan repeated mournfully, “I promise it’ll be over soon. And then you’ll understand.” 

“Understand what? Taehwan, what do you mean? Taehwan-” He felt the cold of the water lapping at his ankles and he panicked. “Let me go,  _ no _ , let me-let me go, Taehwan, please I don’t want to go in the water, I can’t-I can’t swim very well, you know that,  _ please- _ ”

“I won’t let you go. Not ever. I swear.”

The water was up to his waist now and Wooyoung twisted, anxiety rising high in his chest. He broke Taehwan’s hold and splashed to the shore, scrambling at rocks that tore at his palms in his haste to get away. He screamed when Taehwan caught him around the ankle, hauling him back into the water.

“No, baby, don’t struggle. It’ll be over fast if you just let it happen.” Taehwan wrapped his arms around Wooyoung’s waist and threw him into the center of the pool, then dove in after him. Wooyoung panicked the moment the water closed over his head, disoriented, and it took him a moment to reorient and figure out which way was up. His head broke the surface of the water and he gagged, spitting out a mouthful of frigid water. 

“Help!” He screamed, struggling to stay afloat. Arms wrapped around his middle and dragged him back down but he kicked and kicked and managed to break free, breaching the water again. 

All his life he’d been terrified of drowning. It was his worst fear, and this,  _ this  _ moment was the stuff of nightmares. “Jongho!” He choked out, when he realized he’d forgotten. Forgotten how to float, how to tread water, how to swim, every stroke Jongho ever taught him. Everything he’d shown him over the years that made going into the water not so scary over the years, as long as Jongho was by his side. “ _ Jongho _ ..” He sobbed.

“You fucking  _ bitch _ ,” Taehwan spat in his ear. “I offer you everything and you still ask for him? You ungrateful  _ slut _ . Well too fucking bad, he’s not here. He can’t save you. But remember, everything is going to be okay. Because I love you. And we’re going to be together forever.”

He pulled Wooyoung under the water. Down, so far down with an iron grip that Wooyoung was too weak to break, too panicked to fight, too much, it was all too much. Water filled his lungs and even though it was ice cold it burned like fire. Burned in his chest, in his throat, in his nose. His ears popped, and his stomach wretched and it tried to expel the water filling it with every panic gulped, but that just hurt, too. It hurt so much that he just gave up. He stopped fighting and just breathed, even though it hurt. Everything faded to nothing, just cold and black and the ache in his chest that was heartbreak and betrayal….

  
  
  


Jongho coughed violently, slumping over to the side. 

Wooyoung stared at him, hands covering his mouth as tears streamed down his cheeks. Jongho remembered. He remembered everything now. Wooyoung had been the love of his life. He’d chosen another man over him and left him, moved to the city with him and cut Jongho off, cut his friends and family off. It wasn’t until his mother had approached Jongho, asked him to go to the city and visit Wooyoung on his campus, try to talk some sense into him, that anyone realized he was missing. 

By then it was too late. The trail was cold. Taehwan was gone and no one had heard from Wooyoung in months. Almost a year. It was like he’d vanished. 

Jongho looked for Wooyoung for two years, but never found a trace of him. 

He was totally unprepared when it happened. 

All his life Jongho had been irrationally afraid of bridges. When he was a child, driving over a bridge was enough to give him the shakes. It was like the second the wheels left the pavement for the surface of the bridge, no matter how big or how small, he couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if his father lost control of the vehicle. If the car plowed into the side of the bridge, would the railing stop them? Would they go careening over the edge? What about when the car hit the water below. Would they float? For how long? A moment? Two minutes? Five? Would it be enough time for them to get out? Jongho was a strong swimmer. His father taught him to swim from the moment he could walk. The water was where he felt the most at home. 

But what if the doors couldn’t open? What if they were trapped there? It wouldn’t matter if he could swim if the doors wouldn’t open. 

When he was seven the christian missionaries taught him the words to the lord’s prayer. They told him that it would protect him, and even though he didn’t understand the english words, he still found himself repeating them over and over again as they crossed each bridge. He didn’t know if it worked, if it really protected him or just distracted him, but it was something. Even if it wasn’t enough, it was something. 

When he got older he wouldn’t say it got easier, but it did get less hard. He could cross a bridge in a car and not think about what it would be like if they drove off the edge, but walking across one was still enough to leave him trembling. His heart would race and his knees would go weak. If he looked over the side he was likely to get so dizzy he might pass out. 

But he wasn’t afraid of heights. Or of falling. It was just the bridge. The idea that it was so high up, over ground or water or whatever else, a structure meant to hold him up and keep him safe while he was transported from Point A to Point B. There was something so terrifying about it failing to do its job. 

It had seemed like some sort of cosmic joke to him at the time. That his life would end by being thrown off a bridge. He understood it better now, knew that Taehwan had looked into his mind and pulled out his most deep seated fear. He had lured Jongho to that overpass on a stretch of deserted highway with an all too tempting trail of breadcrumbs that seemed like they’d lead to Wooyoung, or at least some real answers. 

What he’d found had been Taehwan, leaning on the railing, watching the occasional car drive by underneath. A cigarette dangled from between his fingers. When he saw Jongho he flicked it away into the darkness, an orange ember sparking against the pavement below. 

“Where is he?” Jongho asked, standing as close to the middle of the bridge as he could. There was already a nervous sweat forming on the back of his neck but he ignored it, eyes fixated on Taehwan. “I don’t even have to see him if he doesn’t want to see me. Just show me that he’s okay and I’ll leave you alone.”

Taehwan laughed. 

“Sorry to tell you kiddo, but he’s dead.” Taehwan leaned back against the railing, looked at Jongho the way one might look at dog shit on their shoe. “It’s your fault, too, you know. If you hadn’t gone putting ideas in his head I would have had more time. I could have made him see.”

“Wooyoung is dead?” Jongho repeated. Saying the words were easier than he’d thought they would be. He’d been living with the thought for so long, he had just never had the courage to say it out loud. Taehwan was scum and even if Wooyoung had been fooled at first, it wouldn’t have taken him two years to figure out that he wasn’t good for him. Wooyoung wouldn’t have let him keep him away from his parents and his little brother for two years without so much as a phone call.

“I killed him myself.”

Jongho flinched, jaw tense, but didn’t rise to the bait. 

“What did you do with the body, if you killed him yourself?”

Taehwan smiled, the yellow wash of the streetlights threw his face into gruesome shadow. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Fuck you!” Jongho swore. “Just tell me where he is. His family misses him.”

“And what, you’ll just let me go?” Taehwan crossed his feet at the ankle, “I don’t think so. He’s dead. Now you can stop looking for him. Aren’t you happy?”

“You’re sick!” Jongho spat.

“And yet he still picked me.” Taehwan ran a hand through his hair, a perfect imitation of the way Wooyoung used to smooth his fringe back out of his face. “I wonder what that says about him? Maybe he was a little bit sick, too.”

Jongho charged across the bridge, grabbed Taehwan by the collar, and shook him. 

“Don’t talk about him! You don’t deserve to talk about him-”

“Talk about him? I fucked him. Had him moaning under me so many times I can’t even remember them all. I fucked him the night I killed him. He was in my bed just hours before he met his end. How does that make you feel, Jongho-yah? That he got on his knees for me-”

Jongho punched him, right in his smirking mouth. He felt teeth tear at his knuckles and the burst of warm blood as Taehwan’s bottom lip burst open like an overly ripe berry. He pulled back to punch him again but Taehwan melted out of his hands. One second Taehwan was there and the next he was gone. He whirled around to see Taehwan standing behind him, thumbing at his split lip.

“You always were a little shit.”

He shoved him before Jongho could even comprehend how he’d managed to get behind him. It took Jongho a second to realize he was falling, but when he did he wasn’t ashamed to admit he screamed. Screamed like he’d never screamed before in his life. One of the last things he ever saw in that lifetime was Taehwan’s face grinning down at him as he leaned over the railing to watch him fall, another cigarette already glowing between his fingers. 

Jongho hit the pavement below in a burst of golden pain. His ribs broke, his shoulder dislocated, his skull cracked. He lost consciousness almost instantly. 

_ ‘Don’t you wish you had more time?’ _

The voice was nothing more than whisper at first. He thought he was hearing things. His brain was swelling and he was hallucinating. Everything hurt. Jongho was second from dying. His lungs weren’t working, punctured and filled with blood. He opened his eyes.

There was a man standing next to him. Tan skin, a fox-like face with narrow, golden-orange eyes, and dark hair with a stark streak of white at the temple. 

“I can give you more time.” The man said, hands tucked into the pockets of ridiculously tight leather pants. “But you would have to do something for me in return.” He crouched down next to Jongho’s near-corpse. “Your Wooyoung is dead, but he’s not gone. He’s trapped, and there’s someone I love trapped with him. Help me find him, and I’ll save your life.”

Jongho’s breath gurgled in his ruined chest. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even really blink, but somehow, he nodded. 

“Is that a yes?” Jongho nodded again, the merest twitch of his head. “Brilliant.” The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring with a brilliant orange stone set into it, “My name is San. We’re going to be amazing friends.”

  
“SAN!” Jongho roared, jumping to his feet. “Get out here!” The ring on his finger glowed and then the same man was standing there in his living room. Hair pushed back to show off glowing orange eyes and the dashing streak of white in his hair. 

“Yes?” He smiled, the sharp point of his fangs only made him more dashing. 

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“That’s not how this works.” San prowled around the room, poking at the frames of a few of Jongho’s favorite photographs. “You forget everything about who you were before. That’s part of the deal. And I can’t do anything to make you remember or else the pact is broken and you would die. I need you alive.” San shrugged. “Fifty years is nothing to me. I’ve waited over three centuries to get Yeosang back.”

“Wooyoung-” Jongho turned to the banshee, to ask him to lead them to where his body was, but the boy was gone. “Where did he go?”

“I imagine that Jinnyun has informed Taehwan that you finally have your memories back. He’s probably gone back to the spring and forced Wooyoung back into whatever crevice he's hidden him in.”

“The spring…” Jongho repeated, eyes widening. “He’s in the spring?”

San smiled at him, sad. 

“They both are.”


	7. Chapter 7

The pool sparkled before him, the surface as mirror smooth as ever. 

“How will I find him?” Jongho asked. San stood beside him, hands tucked into his pockets like this wasn’t the culmination of everything he’d been working towards. 

“I imagine that he’ll find you.”

Jongho nodded, stripping off his heavy leather coat and kicking off his boots before he dove in.

Almost immediately Wooyoung appeared in front of him, ghostly pale skin and snow white hair. Eyes a burning red and skin covered in the black veins of rot and corruption. 

“Take me.” Jongho said, the words escaping him in a stream of bubbles. 

Wooyoung’s hands curled into the back of his hair as he smiled; deadly, beautiful, and not a trace of the boy he once knew in those demon’s eyes. He pressed his lips to Jongho’s and Jongho’s kissed him back, wrapped his arms around Wooyoung’s waist and held him close as they sank down, down, down to the very bottom of the spring. So far down no light penetrated the icy depths- but that was when he felt it. The slight tug of the current changing directions. There was a crack down here. An opening. He shoved the spectre of Wooyoung away and let the current take him.

Somehow he still managed to hear Wooyoung’s banshee shriek of indignation, even through the barrier of the water. The current swept him into the opening. His lungs burned and he had to keep himself from letting go of the little bit of air he had left when his shoulder slammed painfully into the stone walls, but it was only a few seconds before he was spat out into a much wider, open stretch of water. He kicked, striving to reach the surface as quickly as possible. His head broke air and he gasped in a desperate lungful before he truly registered that he’d been deposited into a cave. He struggled for the shore, shoulder burning painfully as San worked to heal it. 

He didn’t know what he expected to find, but the glimmering glass coffin emitting a soft white light, situated just a few meters from the lapping waves of the shore was not it. 

Wooyoung was just how he remembered him. Peroxide and sun bleached hair smoothed back from a peaceful forehead, full lips just slightly parted as if he were sleeping. He looked like the sleeping princess in every fairytale movie from Jongho’s childhood, but infinitely more ethereal. 

He wore a pair of silk pajamas and his feet were bare. The only other thing adoring him was a large sapphire ring, nestled on his left hand ring finger. 

San appeared next to the coffin, pressing his palm to the glass as he stared at the ring.

“Yeosang…” He called, and the ring pulsated weakly. “Sang-ah, I found you…”

“What is this thing?” Jongho asked, walking around the coffin slowly. 

“Magic.” San shrugged, “Meant to preserve him.”

“What will happen when I take him out?”

“He’ll die.” A voice answered.

Jongho whirled around and this time, he recognized Taehwan. He hadn’t that day on the mountain trail, when Taehwan had slashed that girl’s throat and had been content to sit there and watch her die, but Jongho remembered him now. 

“I thought you said you killed him.” Jongho stated. 

“Of course I killed him. You saw it, didn’t you? When you took that little trip into his head? I should have found a way to lock his spirit away, too, but I was afraid if I did that he’d rot from the inside out before he finally accepted what he was.”

“You can’t force the pact on someone.” San growled. “They have to agree.”

“Wooyoung didn’t want to die.” Taehwan shrugged. “He agreed, or else he’d be dead right now. But he refused to  _ accept _ what he’d agreed to. He never woke up. I couldn’t stay here and wait for him to realize we were meant to be together. I needed a larger hunting ground, so I built him this tomb and I come back every few years to check on him. One day he’ll realize…” He dragged his fingers along the surface of the glass and San placed a quelling hand on Jongho’s arm when he moved to slap Taehwan’s hand away. “And then  _ you  _ had to come back here. I don’t know what pulled you here after all these years but you’ve ruined  _ everything _ . His spirit used to wander the mountain but it wasn’t him. It was his  _ anger _ . And here in this pool it was his bitterness and his need for vengeance, but it wasn’t  _ him. _ ” He slammed his fist down on the lid off the coffin. Hairline fractures formed and then immediately sealed. Wooyoung didn’t even twitch. “What is it about you, Choi Jongho? Why did his spirit recognize you when it refused to recognize me? Even when I fell to my knees before it and begged?”

“He was my best friend.” Jongho whispered. “He was everything to me. I loved him.”

“I loved him, too!” Taehwan roared, whirling on Jongho to catch him by the collar of his soaking wet shirt. “I would have given him everything.”

“You killed him.” Jongho shook his head. “You  _ drowned _ him, Taehwan. That was the thing he was the most afraid of in the entire world and you made him go through it. How could you do that to him if you loved him?”

“He wouldn’t have remembered!” Taehwan shoved him away, his hands flying up to his hair as he pulled at it desperately. “He wouldn’t have remembered how he died. And I would have been there for him when he woke up.”

“But he never woke up. Because you broke him.” Jongho said, voice firm. 

“He wouldn’t have  _ remembered! _ ” Taehwan screamed, “If it wasn’t for  _ you _ he still wouldn’t remember. Now he’s never-he’s  _ never _ going to wake up. Because of you.” Slowly, he pulled a knife from the sheath on his hip. Jongho had been so focused on Wooyoung before that he hadn’t even noticed it, but it was a wicked thing. Gleaming silver and as long as his forearm. “Do you know the best way to kill an immortal, Choi Jongho? You chop off his  _ fucking head! _ ” He snarled, “You’re demon can’t grow that back.”

Taehwan lunged at him and Jongho dodged. 

“If you’re going to try to stab someone, maybe you shouldn’t announce it first.” San suggested with a chuckle. He watched Taehwan stumble as he missed, knife finding no purchase in flesh. 

Taehwan turned, slashing the knife towards San instead. The blade met nothing but smoke, San’s chuckle echoed through the cave as he reappeared on the other side of the coffin. 

“You can’t hurt me, boy.” He laughed. “I’m older than the dirt under your grimy little fingernails.” 

Taehwan roared in frustration, whirling on Jongho once again. The blade flashed through the air, caught Jongho right across the bicep before he could move out of the way quickly enough. 

“Holy fuck,” Jongho swore, his hand cupped the wound, blood seeping between his fingers for just a moment before it knit shut. He glared at Taehwan, “Enough.” He threw his mind out, forcing it into Taehwan’s the same way he would a mortal. He’d thought it would be harder, but Taehwan kept his fear right at the forefront of his mind, always. 

“Wooyoung…” Jongho called out softly. It only took him seconds to appear. 

It was the Wooyoung from his memories. Slicked back bleached blond hair, sunkissed skin, gorgeous expressive eyes, and a sad, sad smile. 

“Taehwan-hyung.” Wooyoung spoke, and his voice echoed like it was traveling through the years to get to them. 

“W-Wooyoung-ah,” Taehwan stammered, “You remember me?”

“Of course I remember you.” Wooyoung shook his head. “How could I forget you?”

“Why won’t you wake up?” Taehwan asked, voice shaking. “I’ve waited so long, why won’t you wake up?”

“I don’t want to.” Wooyoung said, “I don’t want this.”

“Why?” Taehwan wailed, eyes wild. “I’ll give you anything, everything you could ever want.”

“I know that.” Wooyoung shrugged, “But the thing is…” He looked Taehwan straight in the eyes. “I don’t want you. You would give me anything, but I don’t want it. Not from you. You make me sick. I can’t stand the sight of you. More than anything in the world I wish I had never met you. I hate you, Taehwan. And while you breathe, I’ll never wake up. I won’t give you the satisfaction.”

“NO!” Taehwan screamed, “No, that’s not true. I-It’s a trick!” Taehwan pointed at Jongho. “It’s you! You’re doing this! It’s not real! Wooyoung l-loved me and when he wakes up he won’t remember what I did. He w-won’t remember and then we’ll be together forever-”

“No, Taehwan.” Wooyoung denied, “It won’t be like that. I won’t let it. I refuse.”

“You heard him!” San laughed uproariously, “He hates your fucking guts, you psychotic asshole. Look what you did to him. Boyfriend of the year.” 

“ _ Fuck you! _ ” Taehwan screamed, spit flying. 

“Enough of this!” San boomed, “I grow tired of this game.” He waved his hand and Taehwan went flying. He hit the far wall of the cave and slumped to the ground, dazed. San appeared before him, crouched down, and slipped the ring off his finger. 

“You can’t do that,” Taehwan mumbled, “You can’t take her from me.”

“He’s not taking me.” Jinnyun said, appearing next to San. “I’m leaving you. You are of no use to me now, you damaged little thing.” She pouted at Taehwan, her sensuous bottom lip lined in red. Jinnyun draped herself over San’s shoulders, “Oppa,” She purred, “Find me a new one to play with.” 

“I won’t.” San said simply, shrugging her off. “You took Yeosang from me.” 

“Because you stopped paying attention to me!” She whined, “I had to get rid of him.”

“So you killed his charge and stole his ring? You hid him from me for three centuries, Jinnyun?”

“Well you’ve got him back now, haven’t you?” She grinned, fluttering her lashes.

At their feet Taehwan moaned, but the bickering demons ignored him. 

“He’s bound to a living corpse, Jinnyun, I might never get him back.”

“But you have me…” She walked her fingers up San’s arm. “And I can make you just as happy.”

“It was you.” Jongho said suddenly, “You’re the one who warped Taehwan’s mind. Made him kill, made him obsess over Wooyoung.”

She giggled, running her hand down San’s chest. 

“I had to draw my Sannie out. He was hiding from me. I had to let him catch a whiff of his precious Yeosang, didn’t I?”

“You-You tricked me-” Taehwan reached out and grabbed the hem of her robes, she barely even spared him a glance as she reached down and snapped his neck, just like he’d done to Chunsa so many years ago. 

Wooyoung gasped, a single tear coursed down his cheek, and then he was gone. 

“Damn it, Jinnyun!” San swore, “We don’t need to kill!”

“Oh, but it’s so much fun!” She laughed, spinning away from him with her arms in the air.

The blood red ruby caught the light as it spun through the air and Jinnyun froze. She turned to look at San, shocked as the ring broke the surface of the water and disappeared.

“Let’s see how you like a few centuries trapped where no one can find you.” San said, that charming smile of his showing just a hint of fang.

She gasped, opened her mouth like she was going to scream in rage but before a sound could leave her mouth she was gone. Like a light going out. Poof. 

\---

“When will he wake up?” Jongho asked.

“Probably never.” San said sadly, hands tucked in his pockets. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Will you take the ring?” Jongho asked, staring down at the sapphire that pulsed gently with light. 

“No. Wooyoung would die without it, and even if I wanted to, Yeosang wouldn’t let me. He seems quite fond of the boy. He wants to stay here. Wait and see.”

“You can hear him?” 

“I could always hear him. Even when I didn’t know where he was, I could hear him. Little things. When we’re close like this it’s like he’s standing right beside me, I just can’t see him.” San laid his hand on the lid of the coffin, longing apparent in his voice. “I’ll gladly wait a century more, if that’s what you want, Yeosang. Just come back to me someday.”


	8. Chapter 8

Jongho waited. He waited weeks. Months. He waited a year. Every day he would go visit Wooyoung. Talk to him about the things he only now remembered. Memories that he knew for sure now were memories. Things from when they were kids.

Wooyoung never moved. His face was beautiful but it might as well have been carved from stone. His chest didn’t rise or fall under the glass. The ring on his finger continued to pulse, steady unlike before where it had been weak.

Jongho waited a year, and then he had to leave. He couldn’t stay there anymore. He was driving himself mad, but he was also running short on marks, on people to prey upon who didn’t cringe in fear at the sight of him. 

So he visited Wooyoung one last time, he and San. They stood by the coffin, they said goodbye, and they promised they would be back. Jongho promised himself that it wasn’t like Taehwan coming back. 

Two years.

Jongho was living under a new name. He was working as a journalist. A photographer for a prolific paper. He enjoyed his work but what he enjoyed most was the connections. He got to interview police officers, victims, see evidence and crime scene photos. 

And when someone walked free, he would have his new mark.

Tonight was a man who paid a hefty sum of money for the privilege of getting away scot free after beating his wife. She was in a coma and she might never wake up. Maybe it struck too close to home, but Jongho was going to take particular pleasure in this one. 

He caught him just as the man was leaving the hospital, playing the part of the grieving husband. A robbery gone wrong was the official story. Jongho followed the man as he walked down the street. Followed him as he walked into a bar and waited at a table in the corner. Jongho watched him, rifled through his head. Sorted through the blackest parts of the man’s mind until he found what made him tick, and then he found what would break him.

When the man cut down an alley Jongho took his chance. The man had a simple fear. A fear that his image would be ruined. Narcissistic. He cared more about how people saw him than anything else. He would do anything to protect that image, even silence a wife who wanted to divorce him. 

In the end all it took was one simple illusion. A crowd. A group of people there solely to judge him, while a reel of his crimes played out on the grimy alley wall like a projection at a movie theatre. 

“Confess.” Jongho said, “And I won’t show this to everyone you know.”

He left the man a blubbering mess on the ground, slumped against the side of a dumpster.

As Jongho left the alley a voice called out to him.

“That was quite a show.” Jongho froze, not daring to turn around. “It takes some creativity, doesn’t it? You’ll have to teach me, Jongho-yah.”

“Hyung..” Jongho breathed, barely daring to believe it.

“It’s me, Jjong-ah. I woke up.”

Jongho turned, caught Wooyoung in his arms, and kissed him. Their first real kiss. Warm and alive, with nothing supernatural between them, nothing holding them back anymore.

“Well isn’t that cute?” A voice said, unfamiliar but deep and mellow. 

Jongho broke the kiss and looked up to find San standing next to him on the street, his arm slung around the waist of a beautiful creature with shoulder length blond hair and cat eyes the color of the darkest sapphire, his head leaned on San’s shoulder as they observed Jongho and Wooyoung. 

“I’ve missed you, darling.” San said, the very picture of nonchalance. 

“Oh don’t act like you didn’t try to tear the very universe apart to find me.” Yeosang replied just as easily. 

“I would have destroyed them all if I’d thought it would make a bit of difference.”

\---

“The wrong kind of love can fuck you up.” Wooyoung said, later that night. “And I let it fuck me up so bad. I’m sorry, Jongho.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Jongho said, holding him close as they together in bed. “None of this was your fault.”

“I should have listened to you.”

“It’s in the past.” Jongho murmured, pressing his lips to Wooyoung’s hair. He kept waiting for this all to end. For him to wake up from his dearest dream and walk straight into his worst nightmare; a world where Wooyoung hadn’t woken up yet. Might never wake up. Wooyoung curled closer, pressed a kiss to Jongho’s chest right over his heart. 

It hadn’t taken long for Jongho to figure it all out. Yeosang had made the offer and Wooyoung had agreed, but because Wooyoung was trapped inside his own mind, the pact had to come up with another way to feed, and thus the water wraith had been born. Wooyoung’s despair over Taehwan’s betrayal and his guilt over the deaths of those drawn to the pool to sustain his life had been what birthed the banshee. After Taehwan’s death it had taken time for his spirit to heal, time for him to wake up. He’d opened his eyes and followed Yeosang out of the cave just the night before. He’d taken Jongho’s truck from the garage and driven straight to Seoul. Yeosang had led him straight to San, and thus, to Jongho. 

“I love you…” Wooyoung whispered into the dark. “I think I’ve always loved you. I don’t know what I was so afraid of… before. I don’t know why I-why I tried so hard to convince myself that I didn’t. I didn’t want to lose you, I think. It seems silly now, looking back, how I was so afraid to lose you that I pushed you away, in the end…”

“In the end, you found me again.” Jongho reassured him, “And it’s not the end. We have forever, if you want it. At least he was right about that. Do you want that…forever with me?”

Wooyoung was quiet for a moment before he sat up. He swung a leg over Jongho and settled into his lap, straddling him. 

“I want you.” Wooyoung whispered against his lips. “I’ve never wanted anyone more. Erase him, Jongho. Erase him from my skin…kiss me like you love me, Choi Jongho.”

And hadn’t he always? From the very first moment when he saw Wooyoung standing by the edge of that swimming pool? Hadn’t Jongho always loved him? 

“Ah, hyung, I thought you’d never ask.”

Jongho rolled them, stopped only when Wooyoung rested beneath him. Jongho slid his hands down the underside of Wooyoung’s arms and Wooyoung trembled. He scooped his thumbs down over Wooyoung’s chest, grazed his nipples and closed his eyes as he enjoyed the sound of Wooyoung’s moans. He traced Wooyoung’s sides, hooked his thumbs under the hem of Wooyoung’s shirt. His palms caressed the bare skin of Wooyoung’s stomach as Jongho guided his shirt up and over his head, and he whimpered. 

He held Wooyoung’s arms high over his head. Jongho teased his nipples with the barest brush of breath, a light sweep of his tongue. Wooyoung’s body shook. Wooyoung moved to free his hands but Jongho held him still. Wooyoung was beautiful. The faint light made his skin glimmer like gold, the tips of his nipples a darker, deeper brown. He was gorgeous, the sweetest sight Jongho had ever seen, but Jongho hadn’t kissed him yet like Wooyoung had asked. 

_Kiss me like you love me,_ Wooyoung had said, so Jongho did his damnedest to grant him his request. Jongho brushed his lips over Wooyoung’s with the purest simplicity he could muster, measuring out tiny touches of lips and tongue, gentle nips of teeth.

While his mouth moved over Wooyoung’s, Jongho’s hands shaped his body. Rubbed over the soft planes of his stomach, clutched at the shape of his hips. He brushed featherlight kisses along Wooyoung’s jaw, held him close and pushed the waistband of the sweats he’d borrowed from Jongho down his legs. The material glided to pool around Wooyoung’s ankles where he kicked them off. Jongho ran his tongue around the shell of Wooyoung’s ear, dried the damp trail with warm breath as he shoved his own boxers down. When Wooyoung lay naked before him and Jongho finally knew what he looked like bare he could have wept, but he kept his kisses sweet and gentle. 

Slowly, he guided Wooyoung to hook a leg around his hip. Wooyoung’s cock pressed against Jongho’s stomach, hot, wet, and slick. Jongho slid an arm beneath Wooyoung’s thigh until his fingertips pressed to his entrance. Wooyoung bucked beneath him, but Jongho held him still, his face buried in Wooyoung’s neck. He kissed Wooyoung like he loved him, touched him like he loved him. This was what love was, the warm glow as well as the fire.

Jongho wrapped a hand around Wooyoung’s cock, smeared the slick of precome down to ease the slide of his hand and set up a steady rhythm. Wooyoung purred beneath him, his body arching up against Jongho’s in the most delicious way as he panted and writhed.

“Ah, Jongho!” He cried out, hands tangling in Jongho’s hair. When Wooyoung came in Jongho’s hand, Jongho hushed his tiny whimpers and cries with his mouth. Jongho soothed him, easing Wooyoung back, letting his body calm. Jongho rested his forehead against Wooyoung’s shoulder until his breathing steadied.

“More..” Wooyoung turned his head to whisper in Jongho’s ear, lips brushing his hair. 

The first slow press of his fingers into Wooyoung’s body felt like a fever dream. Wooyoung wrapped his arms around Jongho’s neck and held him tight, skimming his hands over Jongho’s back as he wiggled, fitting his body to Jongho’s, allowing Jongho’s cock to settle heavy between his thighs. Wooyoung’s hands roamed over smooth skin and muscles, counted the vertebrae down Jongho’s spine to the small of his back.

Jongho sprinkled light kisses along Wooyoung’s jaw, his cheek, the tip of his nose and with the addition of a third finger deemed him ready. Jongho eased up on his knees and rearranged Wooyoung’s legs. Slid a pillow under his hips and Wooyoung watched, letting Jongho move him how he wanted; a small, happy smile on his face. Wooyoung reached up and pulled him back down, wrapping his legs around Jongho’s hips.

Jongho pushed into Wooyoung’s heat and Wooyoung arched up to meet him, but Jongho placed a hand on his hip and held him still. He wanted their first time to be something beautiful. They had all of forever to discover what things could be like between them, but tonight, he wanted it to be something sweet. Wooyoung urged him to move with his palms, digging his fingers in deep, begging Jongho to fill him again and again. But Jongho stilled, making him cry out.

“Please, Jongho-yah. Please.”

“In a minute,” Jongho said, his breathing as harsh as Wooyoung’s, the sweat on their chests mingled together from how closely they were pressed. “Just let me feel it...”

When he began to move again, he pressed his forehead to Wooyoung’s and whispered everything he loved about him. Everything he’d missed about him. Every single thing he’d wished he’d told him before it was too late. Through it all, Wooyoung’s eyes never left his face.

Only when every breath Wooyoung took caught in his throat, when he could no longer remain still beneath Jongho as he talked, when Wooyoung’s fingers slipped on their wet skin, did Jongho reach the end of everything he wanted to say to him. Wooyoung cried out as Jongho pushed him towards his release. 

“I love you, Jongho.”

“Ah, hyung,” Jongho groaned as his body shuddered and he came to rest in Wooyoung’s arms. “I love you, too.”

Wooyoung held Jongho there, close to his heart.

\---

The park the man had chosen to walk through to get back to his seedy motel from the equally seedy diner he’d eaten a midnight dinner at was dark, cold, and very windy. Only three more days and then his boys would pull him out. If only the operation hadn’t gone wrong. If only that bitch hadn’t opened her mouth and ratted them out to the police. 

They’d caught up to her, in the end. Taught her a lesson her soul would never forget even as her body rotted at the bottom on the Han River. The scratches and bruises on his face, the bite mark on his arm- that was what was keeping him trapped in that shithole of a motel until they could pull him out. One look at him and anyone with a brain would know he’d off’d someone. It was better this way, even if the food was shit. 

In the distance, he heard something that sounded eerily like a human scream and he froze, looking over the shadowed rocks and trees that lined the path. There was no one there, but for some reason the hair on the back of his neck stood on end and he swore, kicking a sizable rock into the underbrush just to prove he wasn’t afraid. 

He rounded the corner and let out a scream of his own when he saw a young man standing in the middle of a path, snow white hair sticking wetly to his forehead, the black of decay around his wicked mouth, veins standing out in stark relief in a bloodless face set off by strange, glowing sapphire eyes.

A heavy hand fell on the man’s shoulder, the sleeve of a leather jacket just visible out of the corner of his eyes, and the boy smiled, eyes dancing wickedly.


End file.
